


Passion and Fury

by oregonienne



Category: Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic
Genre: Autistic OC, F/M, Gen, canon-ish?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-12
Updated: 2017-12-04
Packaged: 2018-11-13 02:31:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 31,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11175156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oregonienne/pseuds/oregonienne
Summary: Alekte's mind had always worked differently from anyone else's, as far as she knew. As a powerful Sith warrior with her husband, Captain Quinn, at the head of her dedicated crew, her weaknesses were shored up and her strengths could shine. But the day she met with Darth Marr, hunting their former Emperor in Wild Space, her supports were swept away and she had to find a way to rebuild.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Alekte is my Sith Warrior, and because I am autistic with ADHD, so is she -- it's the only way I know how to be. I'm writing this to explore what happens to her in KOTFE and KOTET when she loses her support system and is dropped into an unfamiliar and changing situation.
> 
> Thanks very much to [Tishina](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Tishina/pseuds/Tishina) for her input on this!

Alekte stared past Malavai at the wall as he put the last pieces of her armor in place. She had never needed him to do this for her, exactly, but she did appreciate it. Helping her on with her armor had been his idea, actually, and it gave her space to pull in her focus when she needed to be the Wrath. And, of course, she would never turn down a chance to have Malavai’s hands on her.

Focus was what she needed right now. Aside from the usual things pulling at her, she could sense a strange and unsettling presence, the reason for her meeting with Darth Marr in Wild Space. She knew it would mean another upheaval if Darth Marr’s theory – that it was the Emperor – turned out to be true, but she was itching for a fight. 

“Are you sure you don’t want me to go with you, my love?” Malavai asked, fussing over some minute adjustments to Alekte’s armor. 

“Yes,” she replied. “If anything comes of this, we’ll probably need to move out quickly, and I want you here to make sure we can leave as soon as I’m back on board.” Alekte wrapped her arms around Malavai’s waist and pulled him close. “I’m sure I won’t be as long as you seem to think. And I’ll call you right away if I need you.” She moved one hand up to the back of his neck and pulled him down for a soft but lingering kiss. “For anything.” 

Malavai smiled into her kiss, and made a quiet huff of a laugh. “I have no doubt that you will,” he said, straightening and brushing his hands down Alekte’s arms one last time to clear away any invisible imperfections. “Right. Are you ready to go?” 

Alekte nodded once, gave him a quick peck on the cheek, and opened the door. As he followed her out of their quarters, Malavai watched her change from just Alekte to the Empire’s Wrath. She was always the same person, but he could swear he saw her draw something into herself to become the unstoppable, powerful warrior that so many feared, and that he fell in love with all over again every day. He smiled at her, full of love and pride, as he made his way to the bridge and she went to meet Vette at the airlock. 

“Hey, boss,” Vette said as they made their way down the gangway. “Think we’ll be here long?” 

“No, I should be back shortly,” Alekte replied. “Have Marr’s crew service the ship in the meantime.” 

“You got it. Your name usually gets us pretty fast service anyway,” Vette said with a grin. “And I won’t let any of those Republic tagalongs get too close, either.” The port to Darth Marr’s ship opened, and Vette headed back toward the _Nemesis_. “Can’t be too careful,” she muttered, not quite under her breath. 

Alekte made a quiet, exasperated sigh as she stepped aboard the _Terminus_. She knew Vette meant well, but this truce, such as it was, was a delicate thing, and even an offhanded remark could be poison at the wrong place and time. 

She acknowledged the small honor guard of Imperial and Republic troops with a polite nod as she passed them. Alekte’s mother had been a commander in the Imperial navy before she retired, and even though Alekte herself was Sith, she was very much her mother’s daughter, and respected the military a great deal. 

“Lord Wrath.” The captain – Fora, she thought, but couldn’t quite remember – came to attention at the head of the line. 

“Captain.” Alekte nodded to the woman, thankful that acknowledging an officer by rank was sufficient, and would cover how terrible she was with names. 

“Lord Marr awaits you on the bridge. I trust you remember the way?” 

_Of course I do,_ thought Alekte. _What kind of a thing to say – no, she’s just being polite; it’s fine._ She looked down, tugging absently and unnecessarily on her gloves, and brushed past the captain’s question. “Has Marr really found the Emperor all the way out here?” 

“I wouldn’t presume to speak for Lord Marr,” Captain Fora answered. “But I’ve never known him to exaggerate. Welcome aboard.” 

With that, the captain stood aside, and Alekte made her way to the bridge. Already she missed having her own Captain Quinn at her side. She could – _and did,_ she thought to herself – function perfectly well without him, in many situations. As long as she wasn’t expected to be anything other than a Sith to non-Sith, she was fine. It was normal for her not to remember, or care about, a person’s name, or what they might want from her. But it wasn’t how she preferred to operate. Malavai was so good at all the little details and nuances that she tended to miss. Still, when going to meet Darth Marr, she felt the need to prove that she was capable of acting on her own; that she didn’t need him to assist her with everything. 

She found Darth Marr on the bridge, as expected. He was an imposing figure, and exactly the kind of Sith she most admired. He was ruthless, yes, when he needed to be; he was also pragmatic when it was called for, and did not put his personal ambitions above the Empire. 

Alekte knew she was expected, and wasn’t one for pleasantries in any case. Joining Darth Marr on the bridge, she got right to the point. “I received your message. Now that I’m here, I sense it too.” 

“We grow closer every moment,” he said. “Our former Emperor is out there.” 

The presence they both felt was somehow more unsettling here, looking out on the expanse that was nothing but stars and silence – and the Emperor, somewhere. Alekte didn’t know if there were any other Sith who were as terrified of the Emperor as she had always been, even before he’d shown his hand and forced them to acknowledge who they’d really been serving. It wasn’t as if she could talk about it, either. For most of her life, the Emperor had been a threat lurking under the surface of life in the Empire – the kind of god-king you appeased and lived in fear of. The kind you had no choice but to serve if you were Sith. As his Wrath, she’d been empowered, but still terrified, which she knew was by design. It had been a relief when she and Lana and Theron laid that threat bare and Darth Marr stepped up to lead. Being the Empire’s Wrath fit her like little else did. 

“What will we do when we find him?” she asked, not really expecting a concrete answer. “We still don’t know how to destroy him.” 

“If he’s taken on a physical form, we will destroy it. That will weaken him. If he remains incorporeal, at least we will know where to strike, even if we don’t know how.” 

“We have to find some way to answer this threat, once and for all,” said Alekte, knowing that Marr shared her frustration but had no more answers than she did. “I’m tired of only putting it off. Or worse, making it go to ground, and possibly becoming stronger before it comes up again.” 

“Why travel so far?” he spat out. There had to be an answer somewhere, something they were missing. “Why consume every living thing on Ziost, then turn and flee into the depths of Wild Space?” 

“For all his shows of power, he must have a weakness, or he wouldn’t have stopped with Ziost.” Alekte grasped for some kind of answer, some new avenue they hadn’t been down and back a dozen times already, and came up with nothing. _Where was Lana when they needed her?_

“That would be reassuring, wouldn’t it?” Marr said, with a mirthless chuckle, and moved on from the fruitless speculation. “If we do find him, I believe I can press the Dark Council into line. But I’m beginning to doubt the Republic will make any serious contributions. Their assistance here has been useful, but…limited.” 

_And where was Theron, too, for that matter?_ “With or without the Republic, this has to be done,” Alekte answered. “We’ll find a way.” 

“My lord!” 

Their discussion was interrupted by an officer on the bridge. “Sensor contact, fifteen klicks. Small, no life form readings…appears to be some kind of probe.” 

A holo image of the probe appeared just as the thing itself sped by the window. 

“Readings are identical to scans from the unknown force that attacked Korriban,” called out another officer. 

Alekte’s fingers twitched; her focus jumped and scattered. She could feel something rushing in. 

“Raise shields. Pursue and destroy.” Marr was decisive, and she was ready. 

Alekte began to pace the deck, fingers dancing in a rhythm now. She was ready. She needed to move. 

“This could be an ambush,” she said, half to herself, her tone flat as she scanned the window. 

“It will certainly become one if we allow a probe to escape.” 

_THERE._

Ships arranged in a grid appeared. And something else. Something that punched its way into Alekte’s focus, ripped it apart, and pulled it back in all at once. 

She held her lightsaber hilts in a tight grip. _Ready._

“Evasive maneuvers! Come about 180 degrees!” 

_Quinn_. But there was no time. 

Something hit the ship. Another, another, and another. 

The officer called out again. “We’ve been boarded! All decks report hostile forces!” 

Alekte pulled her saber hilts from her belt. 

“I’ll sweep for boarders. You get us out of here.” Alekte stalked away, not waiting for a response. Her twin sabers sprang to life. Her mind roared into focus, bright and sharp and white-hot, drowning out Darth Marr’s voice as she left the bridge. 

She didn’t have to go far to find what she was looking for. Lunging down a passageway, she landed in the middle of a group of three droids, the impact reverberating and breaking them apart. Her passion ignited a raging fire inside her and she swept through the ship, passing Imperial and Republic troops, shocked and injured but fighting, together. 

Without stopping, she threw her sabers out in front of her, and hit three more. All destroyed, by the time her sabers returned to her hands. 

She kept moving. A shout of pure force and rage struck another, disorienting it long enough for her to dismantle it. 

It felt so good to fight. To have something to spend her fury on, her desire for Malavai’s presence, and her worry for him. Another pack of droids went down. 

Her progress was stopped by an energy shield and two officers, arguing over closing a blast door. Alekte moved right up to the shield and waited. This was where she needed Quinn; he would have known, somehow, what she wanted, and ordered the shields down. 

But he wasn’t here, now. She pushed aside her focus, as heavy as the blast door they were trying to close, and gave her orders. “Drop that shield,” she growled. “Now.” 

Whatever the soldiers said, she didn’t hear it. The shield dropped, her focus snapped back into place, and she sprang forward. At the end of the passageway, another pod had broken through, and the droids had a sizable group of soldiers pinned down. Soldiers who were needed elsewhere, and who were no good to anyone behind a blast door. They seemed to know that as well as she did, and made their way back the way she had come as she dispatched the droids. 

It was over almost too quickly. She needed this, needed to move, needed to fight. She returned to the blast doors. She knew the soldiers there were speaking to her, but she heard no words, only a dull noise. 

She gave her orders as she stalked by. She couldn’t stop now; the Force was a raging wildfire inside her, and it needed to burn something. If she stopped, she felt it would be her. “Close this door and report to the bridge,” she called out as she passed. 

Alekte didn’t know what she would do if she couldn’t fight; what would happen to this electric energy that always seemed to be inside her, always needed a way out. It propelled her through the ship. For her, for now, there was nothing but the Force, her rage, and her passion. 

As she fought her way through the rest of the ship, the fire slowly spent itself. By the time she was able to stop, it was less of a wildfire and more of a furnace – contained, but still burning and ready to consume. She was about to call Quinn to meet her when her comm chimed. 

“Are you there?” Vette’s voice had an urgent tone, but not enough to worry Alekte just yet. “Droids put a bunch of holes in the airlock and melted the docking clamps. We could use some help!” 

“I’m on my way,” Alekte said. She could tell the connection was fading in and out – static overlaid what sounded like shouting between Vette and Pierce. She wasn’t sure if her message had been received; fortunately, she was close to the docking area. She started running toward her ship. 

She arrived to find bodies and wrecked droids littering the floor, flames everywhere, and a huge piece of burning wreckage blocking the way to her ship. To her crew. To Malavai. 

She pounded the release for the docking clamp, hoping for some kind of result. She was useless with this sort of thing. A blinding white desperation began to take over, throwing any possible solutions out of her grasp. 

The ship gave a sickening lurch, and more wreckage fell to block her way home. But she could see it, her ship, flying free and speeding away, taking Malavai away from her. 

“Whoa – okay, we’re free!” Vette’s voice came over the comm. “But…there’s a lot of guys out here, boss.” 

Alekte could hear her blood rushing in her ears. She didn’t know how long it took for her to speak. “Vette,” she said in a hoarse, hollow whisper. “Where is Quinn?” 

“He’s – hey, what the kriff was – he’s in the medbay. Jaesa fell and took a pretty bad hit with that last one.” She paused, and resumed in as serious a voice as Alekte had ever heard from Vette. “You want me to…?”

Words failed her. All she could think of was him, her Malavai, her love. 

“No,” she exhaled. She took a deep breath in and rushed through her orders. Words were hard to find and slipping away; she knew she didn’t have much time. “If you see an opening to escape, take it. Someone has to get back to the Empire.” 

“What?” Vette’s incredulous shout came over the comm. Alekte should have known she’d question the order, but this was not at all the time for it. “And just leave you here?” 

“Vette! Go! Now!” She didn’t want to shout, not at a time like this, but it was the only thing she had left. Kind words were well out of her reach now. She hoped Vette would understand. Hoped Malavai would understand. 

“Okay. Just…don’t die out here.” The line went back to static and garbled speech again, and Alekte could swear that she heard Malavai’s voice in it before it cut out completely. 

The ship gave a violent shudder and Alekte fell to her knees. A strangled sob escaped her, turning into a rage-filled growl as she got to her feet. She heard Darth Marr’s voice over the ship’s comms, directing her to the engineering deck. If there was any hope of escape, any way for her to get home, that was where it would be. 

Igniting her twin sabers again, she pulled everything in – her fury, her desperation, her pain. Nothing she encountered would survive her now. 

She met Darth Marr and they swept through the ship. She could hear him speaking to his crew but the words were nothing to her. They were both in their element now. She was channeling a force of nature that threatened to burn through her, and he was in command on the front line of a battle. 

They arrived to a hopeless situation at their destination. Shields could be restored, but they wouldn’t last. They hyperdrive was gone. There was no way to escape. 

“Enemies on the bridge! Repeat, enemies on –” A visibly injured Captain Fora flickered in and out on the holo, cutting out finally with the sound of blaster fire. 

The battle raged outside, but for Alekte, everything was suddenly quiet. She was numb. There was nothing. 

“There are rudimentary backup controls here, but the enemy ships have us surrounded. We have few options left.” 

Darth Marr’s words barely brushed the surface of her awareness. She stared at the controls in front of her. _My Malavai, my love,_ repeated over and over in her head, like a song she couldn’t shake, until the words blended together. What would he do if he were here? What could be done now? 

She could save him. She could do something; she could try. She held her passion and fury and fear in a vise grip and kept her voice steady. “Then we take as many of them with us as we can.” 

She remained steady on her feet as she felt the ship accelerate toward the enemy fleet. She only hoped her own ship had already made it away; she did not want them to have to see this. She did not want Malavai to watch her die. 

_Take your time, my love. I’ll see you again._

And then, nothing. 


	2. Chapter 2

She had not expected to wake up. For some time after, Alekte would maintain, if asked, that she had not wanted to wake up. 

She was in hostile territory; that much she guessed. The presence she’d felt before was stronger here, more definite. But this time, instead of tearing at her focus, it only hardened her resolve. She kept her eyes closed and her breathing measured as she assessed the situation using her remaining senses. 

She could sense two – no, three – others in the immediate area. One of them was incredibly strong in the Force. If that person knew she was awake, which was entirely possible, they weren’t doing anything about it. _Interesting_. Alekte filed away that bit of information. She didn’t know what it meant, or what purpose it might serve, but that wasn’t the point. All information was potentially useful to her. 

She was lying on a thin mat over a hard surface. Her hands were bound in heavy cuffs, which would normally have sent her mind spiking and piercing her focus, but here and now, the weight and pressure of them grounded her. She was stiff and sore, and could smell a hint of kolto, but she guessed she was more or less intact now. 

_How badly was I injured? How long have I been out? Where am I?_

She knew she was on a ship. She could hear the low hum of the engines. The air seemed to be clean. She could hear someone shifting their weight, people breathing, the quiet static of a force field very close by. She was in a cell. 

Alekte opened her eyes. 

She had been correct in her assessments. One guard stood next to where she lay, turning toward her as she sat up, and one stood outside the doorway. The cell was larger than she expected. It was obviously meant to hold more than one person, but she was alone, except for the guard and the man who was approaching her now. 

“You’ve awakened. I trust you can walk.” 

Alekte glared up at him, not answering. She’d never been a prisoner before, but she’d been on the other side of this sort of situation enough times to know that she did not want to give this man a chance to glean anything from whatever answer she might give. She could get no sense of him at all, other than that he was strong with the Force. She could read nothing in his tone, and most of his face was obscured by a mask. Not that that mattered. Mask or not, she rarely gathered much from expressions. 

“Silence is perfectly acceptable, but it will not help you here. You are in the heart of our empire now. Come along.” 

_Empire? What empire?_ She rose silently and followed him out of the cell, standing as tall as she could manage at her short height and letting her expression settle into the disdainful glare that was her own mask. 

Alekte took in her surroundings, but she could not recognize any sort of insignia that might give her a hint as to where she was. She could see prisoners in other cells, all human as far as she could tell, but nothing about their appearances looked familiar. 

Rounding a corner, she saw Darth Marr, also in cuffs, being led down the hallway toward her by another guard. She felt a distinct sense of relief to see that she was not alone, but she took care not to let it show. His presence strengthened her confidence and resolve, but she could not yet let herself hope that they might make it back to their Empire. 

“What empire have we entered?” growled Marr. 

“The Eternal Empire. Zakuul,” the man answered. “You didn’t even know whose territory you were invading?” 

The audacity of his question shocked Alekte into speaking. “We didn’t ‘invade’ anything. We were looking for someone.” How could he call their presence an invasion? If, as she now felt certain, this Zakuul they had entered was the source of the attacks on Korriban and the Imperial outposts in the Outer Rim, then Zakuul had been the invader. They were only answering the threat, if entering Zakuulan space with one warship could be called ‘answering’. 

“In an armed warship?” asked the man. 

Alekte suppressed an incredulous laugh. “We weren’t looking for a friend,” she replied. She found herself growing more and more confident, emboldened by Darth Marr’s presence. The fire inside her was a clutch of carefully banked coals, ready to be lit at any moment. 

“What do you hope to achieve by taking us prisoner?” asked Marr. The two of them stood together, facing this stranger. They both could sense how powerful he was, but Alekte wondered if he understood how much more powerful she was when she was in her place as the Empire’s Wrath. 

“I have questions. You will provide the answers,” the man replied. Alekte’s determination rose around her like a shield, bolstering the walls in her mind. _Let him try._

“We will tell you nothing,” said Marr, as resolute as she was. 

“You won’t have to speak to give me the answers I need.” 

_So that’s how it’s going to be._ Alekte had expected as much. She was as prepared as she knew how to be; if he got any answers from her, it would be without her cooperation. 

The guards behind them pressed them forward, and they were taken to a shuttle. They flew away from the ship over a planet that had structures on it so tall that the spires reached well outside the atmosphere. The spires were narrow, but she wondered what they must look like on the planet’s surface, to support something so tall. Malavai had told her – 

_No._ She turned away from the window. She could not think of him now, though she desperately wanted to. She clenched her fists, turning her pain and fear into strength and determination. 

Finally, they docked at a spire that stood above all the others. The man, Prince Arcann, led them through the airlock and down a walkway that was lined with soldiers in gold armor, each of them with some kind of lightsaber pike that was like nothing Alekte had ever seen before. She could feel the Force in each of them, though none of them approached Arcann’s strength in it. 

Or hers, for that matter. She filed that away too. 

Arcann spoke as they walked. “We recovered the records from your ship’s computers. Or what was left of them. Fascinating reading.” 

_My ship? No. No. There is no way he could have – no. He must mean the_ Terminus. _Not my ship._ Panic spiked through her, but only for a moment, and pointless as it was, she hoped he hadn’t noticed. 

Arcann stopped, turning to her, and continued. “You Sith are apparently quite formidable. You most of all. To alter the course of galactic events as you have…quite impressive.” 

_Apparently? Impressive?_ She didn’t care how powerful he was anymore. Her panic had turned to anger and it began to drown out her reason. Who was this prince, of some empire she’d never heard of, who had attacked Korriban unprovoked, run away, and then had the gall to accuse _them_ of invading when they’d come to investigate? Who was he to talk to her like this, like she was a promising acolyte at the academy that he had destroyed? 

“You don’t need to be impressed with what I’ve done.” Alekte bit off the words, hurling them at Arcann with all the strength she had. Bound as she was, words were all she had, and she intended to use them. “You need to be afraid of what I’m going to do.” 

“Yes. We’ll soon know what you’re truly capable of,” Arcann replied, in that same condescending tone. 

_He’s trying to make me angry. I should have seen it._ Anger was useful, and an important source of fuel for her, but she hated that she let herself be goaded into it so easily sometimes. 

She let her face settle back into her mask of disdain, glaring at Arcann with cold grey eyes even as the coals of the fire inside her began to seethe. 

Arcann met her unblinking gaze for a moment, until he turned his attention to a man who was walking quickly toward them. Alekte could feel the Force in this one too, but her attention slid away from him and focused on the door at the other end of the walkway. The thing she and Marr had been looking for, whatever it was, was there. 

“Heskal,” Arcann addressed the man. “Still waiting for the catastrophe that you and your Scions foretold?” 

_Scions._ Now she had a name for the group this man represented. _But what about the soldiers?_

“You may close your ears to the whispers of fate, my prince,” he replied, “but they cannot be silenced.” 

_Fate? Really?_ Never in her life had Alekte taken seriously anyone who spoke about fate, or destiny, or prophecy. Not even the Voss, the only other people she’d met who put any stock in that sort of thing, until now. 

“I wonder if silencing you might suffice.” Evidently, Arcann held a similar point of view. “Take your superstitions elsewhere, Heskal. You are not needed here.” 

Alekte felt the urge to say something again, but instead stayed quiet, her focus being pulled again by whatever was on the other side of that far door. 

Marr spoke, though, for the first time since they’d boarded the shuttle. “Is this why you brought us? To hear you bicker with soothsayers?” 

Arcann looked back over his shoulder. “Come along,” he said. For a moment, Alekte felt a flare of irritation from him, with something else at its core that she couldn’t identify. Then, the walls he’d been maintaining all this time snapped back into place. It was more than being irritated at the interruption, or by Darth Marr’s comment. 

_Could he be afraid of the Scions? Could he really believe that there was something true in what they said?_ It was something else to add to the small but steadily growing list of what she knew about this place and its people. 

Heskal retreated, but not before giving Alekte an appraising look that was no less scrutinizing for its brevity. He appeared not to notice Darth Marr behind her. _Why?_ Alekte keenly felt the absence of –

_No. Not now. I have to get through this._ She threw her longing onto the smoldering coals inside her and felt the flames begin to rise. 

“You’re taking us to your master,” Marr said, his tone almost mocking. Whoever else Alekte might have wished were with her, she was glad to be with an ally, especially one as confident and powerful as Darth Marr. 

“I’m taking you to my father,” said Arcann. “Valkorion. The Immortal Emperor of Zakuul.” 

“An emperor. Just what we were searching for,” responded Marr. 

“You will not find what you wanted here.” Arcann led them down the walkway. 

Alekte didn’t know what Arcann thought they wanted, but she wasn’t sure he was wrong, either. She wanted answers. She wanted this to be over. She wanted to finally meet this threat that had followed her all her life – not its voice, not its hands, not its children – and end it. She didn’t know if it would be possible, but that was not going to stop her from trying. 

Under different circumstances, Alekte would have been transfixed by the view she encountered when they entered the throne room. The walkway, narrow in this space, was surrounded by a huge transparisteel sphere, showing the planet and its spires below. But Alekte would have loved to stop and take in the sight of the galaxy that surrounded them. 

She had always loved the stars. 

She kept walking, though, past the soldiers that lined the walkway, keeping pace with Darth Marr next to her. Her eyes were fixed on the steps that led up to the throne. She did not need to look to see who sat there. She did not want to. 

Arcann stopped just short of those steps, and knelt. “His Glorious Majesty, Immortal Master and Protector of Zakuul: Emperor Valkorion.” 

“Welcome.” 

A wave of dread washed over Alekte as Valkorion spoke. Just one word, but it was enough. She snatched that dread as it passed through her and used it to stoke her flames. She knew who he was, and she was going to make sure that any victory he claimed over her, no matter how small, was hard won. 

“A new name, a new face…these are not enough to hide from us.” Darth Marr’s voice was quiet and steady. 

To her surprise, so was her own. “The Sith Emperor. Your presence is unmistakable.” 

“Oh, I think a mistake has been made. But by whom?” Valkorion’s voice was low and lethal, a predator hiding in the shadows. 

“Do these people have any idea who you really are? The kinds of things you’re capable of?” Alekte’s question held a quiet assertion; she would not be caught off guard. 

“Do you?” Valkorion asked. The predator growled, still unseen. 

“Your constant silence across our history…this was your distraction?” The outrage in Darth Marr’s voice was muted, but it was there. He was ready to strike, while she watched and waited. 

“This was my focus. Everything else…the means to an end.” The predator moved, but stayed hidden. “You claim to have come all this way to find me. Here I am. What do you want?” 

There was no point in trying to hold herself back now. She knew her chances were vanishingly small, but if she was going to die, she was going to die like a Sith. “To destroy you,” Alekte answered, “once and for all.” 

Valkorion rose with a menacing smile. “You say you know me,” he said as he started down the steps toward them. “If that is true, then you know the depths of my power. Whatever you hoped to achieve here, you know, deep inside, that you cannot succeed.” The predator was silent, and backed away, but it was not a retreat. “But you do not have to stand against me. Instead, you can kneel.” 

A gesture from Valkorion and the cuffs on Darth Marr’s wrists fell away in a shower of sparks. He stepped forward, and the predator moved, almost ready to strike. “I will never again kneel to you!” Marr shouted. 

“You would sooner die than acknowledge my superiority?” Valkorion’s tone was even. Alekte watched, still bound, knowing that the predator was only waiting. 

“It is you who fears death, ‘Valkorion’. I do not. I will not kneel,” Darth Marr growled. 

They were his last words. Alekte could only watch as he made his last stand. 

Darth Marr lunged at a soldier, knocking him off of the walkway, and claimed the pike that was left behind. Three more soldiers ran at him. He hurled the pike at them, impaling one and throwing all of them back with a wave of pure Force energy. Alekte almost started to think that the end might not be as near as she thought. 

The predator leapt from the shadows. 

Valkorion raised his hand and unleashed a crackling stream of lightning. It hurled Darth Marr back to land, dead and still sparking, at the feet of a hooded woman dressed in black. 

Alekte had known his death was coming, but had not expected to take it like a blow to the head. Her ears rang and her vision blurred. She was alone now. 

The woman who stood over Darth Marr’s corpse looked down at him for a few long moments. Alekte could feel the power radiating from her; she was even stronger than Arcann. She steeled herself, resisting the urge to put as much distance as possible between her and this woman. 

“Clear the room! Everyone out!” Every soldier in the room moved immediately in answer to the woman’s command. Alekte turned back to face Arcann and Valkorion, taking a few slow paces toward them. 

“Marr gave the Empire leadership, while you used us for your own gain. You are nothing compared to him.” Alekte knew she was approaching her end, and she intended to make the most of it. As far as she was concerned, she had died on Darth Marr’s ship. She was well beyond caring what happened to her now. 

“He was narrow-minded; bound by irrelevant ancient dogma. But I think you are different.” Valkorion, the predator, had her in his sights now. “In all my centuries, you alone have merited my full attention. You leave your mark upon the galaxy wherever you act, just as I do.” 

There was nothing in the galaxy Alekte wanted less at that moment than to be compared favorably to this monster. In his presence, with no ally, she could feel herself faltering. She took hold of her fear, wrestling with it, trying to force it to take a different shape, but it would not move. 

Valkorion paced on the dais. “Look around you. Zakuul is poised to become the greatest civilization in the history of the galaxy. I have forged this empire to surmount all of my previous works. To span eternity.” 

Alekte was sure he could sense her fear, no matter how she tried to hide it away. The predator circled her. He wanted to use her fear. She was determined not to let him. 

The Emperor came toward her, slowly descending the last of the steps. “The Eternal Throne commands a fleet more vast than any ever built. It has the power to reshape the galaxy into any image that I choose. That we choose.” 

_No._ She cast her fear onto the fire. Sparks flew out, and the flames rose. 

Stopping at the foot of the stairs, the Emperor held his hand out to her. “I will share all of this with you…if you will only kneel.” 

It was her turn now, to face the same choice as Darth Marr had. But for her, there were no soldiers to spend her rage on, no way to go down with weapons in hand when they would be immediately thrown aside by the thing in front of her. 

She let herself think of Malavai. 

She cast her mind out, searching for him. She thought of his touch, their love, the family they would never have now. She thought of the way he stood beside her, and she beside him; thought of the passion they shared and the strength it gave her. 

She thought of her love, and she faced the Emperor. She would not appease him any longer. 

“Share?” She almost laughed. “You don’t share anything. You enslave. You devour. I will never be a part of that.” The fire in her raged, white hot and blazing bright. 

“So be it.” 

Valkorion turned away from her and Arcann, who had been standing silently all this time, came toward her. Alekte stood tall and defiant, and ready. 

_Soon, my love. It won’t be long now._

Arcann ignited his lightsaber and raised it, ready to strike. Valkorion stood at the edge of the walkway, looking out at the stars. 

_What is he waiting for? What are_ they _waiting for?_

“You came here to defeat him,” Arcann hissed. “This is your chance!” 

Before she could react, Arcann brought his saber down on her cuffs, shattering them. He tossed her own saber hilts to her and ran at his father. Alekte didn’t know what his plan was, but at the very least, he had given her a chance to die fighting, and for that she was grateful. 

She lit her sabers and watched for an opening as Arcann swung for his father over and over. But each blow only landed on a shield that Valkorion raised as easily as he raised his hand. 

Then, Valkorion struck Arcann with the same lightning that had killed Darth Marr. 

Alekte saw her chance. She took it. 

She ran her lightsabers through his back, and watched them both come out on the other side. 

“This is for all the people you’ve forced to suffer and die.” She held the sabers in place as she spoke, then with a turn of her wrists, pulled them out again. 

The predator opened its vast maw, showing razor sharp teeth. The Emperor laughed. 

A dark miasma poured out of him, and flew toward her with a terrible wind. Struggling against it, she kept to her feet, until a shockwave detonated and knocked her on the floor. 

There was a fog in her mind. Something was seeping in. She could hear voices, felt herself moving, but the fog filled her senses. It crept under the doors in her mind and through cracks in walls as she threw up barriers everywhere she could to try to keep it contained. 

Alekte felt a jolt, something cold and hard against her back. She tried to open her eyes, but she had shut herself in too securely. She could only listen to the whine and hiss as the carbonite closed in around her.


	3. Chapter 3

It was cold. Somewhere, someone was dying. 

Hoth was white and grey. Sharp ice pelted every inch of her as Alekte watched Darth Baras, his hand outstretched and closing slowly into a fist. Frost spread in front of her, branching in infinite spirals. A man fell dead at her feet. 

Behind her, a figure stepped from the shadows. 

“My lord!” Quinn shouted. Alekte whirled to face her attackers, twin lightsabers blazing. They came for her in an unbroken stream: one, then one, then two, then three. The Force flowed through her as she tore them all down. She didn’t understand Quinn’s concern, but she could feel it; icy bands that were somehow still warm. She heard footsteps in the shadows, and she lunged. 

Quinn raised his blaster. 

“I’m sorry it’s come to this, my lord.” Quinn fired on her and his droids advanced. But her fire raged, almost out of control, and the droids soon fell. The sparks from the last one traced slow, curling lines in the air; the first one collapsed, blocking her way. She burst through it with a wave of Force energy and heard a long, strangled gasp. _No._ She stood over her lover’s body, his eyes half open but unseeing. Alekte collapsed to her knees. Pain crackled through her, icy veins tearing her skin. _No. This is not how it happened._

She heard footsteps behind her. 

The steps in the Dark Temple seemed to go on forever. Someone was following her. She could feel them closing in, pressing fear into her. The ever-present whispers were mixed with choking and roughly-drawn breaths. _Where is that coming from?_ She moved faster. The footsteps followed. Somewhere further down the stairs, someone was dying. _Vette? Where are you?_ Her fear surged toward panic. She broke into a run, but the footsteps followed, just as close behind but not quickening their pace. The walls around her cracked and crumbled. A gaping hole appeared. 

Alekte stepped into a cave. 

It was colder here than any other place on Taris. She could feel someone watching her – saw herself, entering the room. She stood against the wall and froze. Around her, she could see bodies encased in carbonite, arranged around four pillars. _Who would agree to this?_ They were people, hung up on the pillars like artifacts. It was horrifying. She watched Quinn and the other Alekte set charges at the base of each pillar. Maybe that was a mercy. She tried to move as the other Alekte approached her position, but she was stuck. No. She was frozen. She tried to scream, tried desperately to move as the pair left the chamber. There was a piercing and stuttering whine, and an explosion. 

Collapse. Crush. Burn. 

Her ears rang. She choked and struggled for breath. The choking sound was everywhere; she could see it, rough and twisted and stretching. The skin on her face crackled as it burned and froze. She could hear distant voices; Malavai’s, and someone else. They were looking for her. Footsteps came toward her, slow and implacable. 

She wasn’t dead. She tried to focus, but all she could find were the sickly yellows and browns of the poison air on Quesh. She was not going to die. Too many people had thought they could end her, and she had proven them all wrong. To die now would be to surrender to all of them. She would not give Draahg that victory. She would not give anyone that victory. 

Malavai called out to her. 

She barely heard him; the fire burned hot and bright inside her and she leapt into a group of House Organa soldiers that moved to attack them. She couldn’t stop now. She felt the sting and chill of Malavai’s kolto darts and Alekte took down three, five, eight of them. She paused as the last one fell. Another one was waiting; she could see it out of the corner of her eye, could hear its slow footsteps. But when she tried to find it, it was gone. 

Malavai approached her at a brisk pace. “You must – will you please give me some warning before you rush in like that, my lord?” Alekte could see love and exasperation in him, pulling in two directions toward the same end. 

She smiled and moved closer to him, but the sparkling cold air of Alderaan froze her lungs and took her voice. She could only smile at him, and take his hand, and hope he could feel the love that shone through her, as bright as any sun. 

They stepped through a doorway. 

She was alone on the lift as it rose from the underground base on Hoth to the surface. She needed to get to her ship, and the lift moved so slowly. She paced, looking up and watching the surface come closer, but the lift did not stop. It kept going up, past the surface, past the mountains. There was no way to stop it. It went up past the atmosphere, past the orbital station, past her ship where she could see her crew, her Malavai, injured and dying. She choked and gasped as the lift carried her away into the dark. 

Everything stopped. 

Alekte opened her eyes in a cold, grey place. She felt a deep and crushing loneliness, utterly unleavened by any sort of hope. She had read a story, when she was young, in which the place blessed by the gods, the place where there was home and family and everything a person wanted, was in the west. And the name of the darkest, most hopeless place translated as simply “not-west”. It wasn’t just that this place was far away; it was that it had been flung so far away that nothing good could ever be possible there. This place, here, where she found herself now, was unsettlingly close to the way she had imagined this “not-west”. 

Narrow, rocky spires climbed toward a sky where burning starships, frozen in battle, flickered in and out against a star-filled expanse. A fog that she could not clear away blurred the edges of her vision. A man stood in front of her, looking up at the sky, his back to her. 

She remembered. 

She remembered the _Terminus_ , the Emperor, Darth Marr’s death. She remembered the carbonite. She remembered the man in front of her, how she’d killed him, and the energy that surged into her after he fell. She knew him for who he was. She was not going to let him keep her here. 

“I have always loved the stars,” he said as she approached him. 

Alekte felt a surge of anger. He had been following her through her memories, through her visions and nightmares. Her own mind, her sanctum, had been torn open by this monster. Hate and anger swelled inside her. She took hold of them and let them take root and grow; she knew she would need them if she wanted to live. 

“You may be able to enter my mind, but I am no longer your Wrath. I will not bend to your will.” She didn’t feel herself speaking, but she knew he heard her words. 

“You have always been more than a title,” he replied. “And you have such a… _fascinating_ mind. To call you Sith is to ignore your true self.” 

Alekte stared out across the barren landscape. She did not want his flattery, his insults, his manipulation. She would not let herself be taken in by them. 

“You have earned my respect,” he continued. “I followed you here so we might speak undisturbed.” 

Alekte could feel rage and indignation choking her. “I don’t have time for you,” she said. She could see her ship, on a plateau far away in front of her. She drew her anger around her and willed herself forward. 

“On the contrary,” he said, his words following her as she took long but stuttering leaps toward the _Nemesis_. “Time is all you have. Use it to evolve.” 

She jumped, and her ship appeared around her. She was standing in the cargo hold. Images of her crew flickered and shifted around her as she made her way through the ship, struggling against an unseen current. 

“Your servants clung to you like parasites on a predator.” Alekte heard his voice before she saw him. He appeared next to her, moving easily while she took slow and heavy steps. “You suffered their existence for years. Even those who deserved death.” 

She fought her way through to the bridge, and there, just as she knew he would be, was Malavai. His image flickered from the console on the far wall, to his pilot’s seat, all around the room; sometimes serene, sometimes tired and harried. She knew she needed to reach him, but something was pulling at her, keeping her from him. 

Valkorion appeared in front of her, his tone mocking. “Passion fades with distance,” he said, standing next to the pilot’s seat where Malavai sat, his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. 

Alekte shook her head. “We’ll be together again.” She was sure of it. It had to be true. 

Cracks appeared in the walls around her. An explosion, slowed by the same currents that held her, slowly tore its way through the ship. The images of her crew were steadier now, but they were burned, bleeding, dying. 

The fire curled toward her. A piece of the hull drove into her back and pierced through her chest, driving her forward into the fire. She felt searing, stabbing pain in her chest and collapsed to her knees, struggling to breathe. 

“What is this? What are you doing to me?” she groaned through gritted teeth. 

Valkorion stood over her, untouched by the flames. “This is not my doing. The carbon freezing was imperfect. Your body is poisoned. Dying.” He disappeared, and the explosion accelerated, tearing the ship apart and throwing her into space. 

“None of this is real,” she gasped, drawing a ragged breath. She heard laughing, low and distant, and she felt something cold and solid under her. 

She came to her feet, uninjured, in a ruined Kaas City. The streets had been blasted apart. Buildings crumbled, and a ruined statue of the Emperor stood between shredded Imperial banners. 

“Our failed Empire.” Alekte turned to see Valkorion behind her. He moved up the ruined bit of street they stood on, and stopped next to her. “You were always superior to the murderous fools in charge here.” 

She ignored his attempt at flattery. “What’s the point of wallowing in _your_ biggest failure?” 

“To prove a point,” he said lightly. “The Dark Council, Imperial Intelligence, Mandalorians…all fail. You alone find victory.” 

“Not while you’re still alive,” she retorted, glaring at the ruined statue in front of her. 

“I am not your enemy,” he said, apparently unbothered. “I will help you see.” He stepped ahead of her, right up to the edge. “The Empire is not worth saving, and the Republic is not worth destroying. There is a greater purpose awaiting us.” 

Alekte wanted nothing to do with his ‘greater purpose’. If she had thought it would do any good, she would have pushed him over the edge then and there. But she stayed where she was. What would he know about how strong the Empire was, when he had abandoned it, or at best, treated it like a diversion? 

“The Empire is stronger than you think,” she said. “I won’t abandon my home.” 

She felt a jolt. The burning pain in her chest returned. 

“Do not let sentiment cloud reality,” she heard as the scene shifted around her. 

She was on another street. Walls of rubble towered over her, and Imperial soldiers aimed their rifles at her. Valkorion stood with them, in front of a crowd of citizens calling for her execution. 

“They want someone to blame for their defeat,” he said, looking at her steadily. “They choose you.” 

Alekte felt for her lightsabers, but they were gone. It didn’t matter. “I won’t waste my strength fighting things that aren’t real.” 

“These are not illusions.” He raised his hand and lowered it in a swift gesture; the soldiers fired. Pain tore through her, and she fell to the ground. 

Her chest heaved. She could feel another jolt, another shift building from far away as he spoke. “Empire, Republic. Both fall before the Eternal Throne. You cannot stop what is to come. Save yourself.” 

She surged forward. She cast out to find something, anything to hold on to, to keep herself in control of her own mind even for a short time. The fact that she had someone in her mind was sickening enough as it was; that it was the Emperor, and he was leading her around as he pleased was almost too much to take. But she knew her mind, far better than he ever could, and what control she had over it had been hard won over many years. She would divert him, learn what he wanted, and use it to defeat him. Somehow. 

A bright light burst in, and began to fade. 

She stood on the shuttle deck of the orbital station above Ziost. Everything shifted around her, but Malavai, standing next to her, remained steady. She could hear voices, too many of them, all speaking over each other; one stood out, and she thought she knew it, but it was gone before she could place it. There was confusion everywhere and too much noise. It was more than she could take. She shook her head and raised her hands to her ears, but it did nothing to block them out. 

Malavai put his hand on her arm, but she was numb; she couldn’t feel him. She saw his lips move but could not hear his voice over the horrible cacophony that filled her head. The Emperor was killing Ziost, and she could hear every death. 

She pitched forward and landed on the ground. 

When she stood again, Alekte was on Ziost. Or some version of it. She could see monoliths, the beasts created by Sith alchemy, on the cliffs high above her. She moved carefully along the canyon floor, relieved to find that her lightsabers were with her again. The anger, pain, and hate she had been cultivating had grown into a mass of thorns and vines. Using techniques she had honed since her days in the Sith Academy, she wove them, over and under and through, to form a thick and impenetrable hedge around her. No one – not Darth Baras, not even Jaesa, as far as she knew – had ever been able to see through it. 

She almost began to think she was alone again, but rounding a corner, she saw Valkorion waiting. 

“Ziost,” he said, turning to face her. “The world where everything changed. For me, for you, for the galaxy.” Unsurprisingly, there was a note of pride in his voice. 

Alekte glared at him. “You killed every living thing here. And then you ran away. Why stop with Ziost?” 

“It served its purpose. What happened on Ziost showed me that I have passed beyond death’s reach.” 

“Everything dies. Even you.” She could not keep the question from her voice. She knew he was building to something, and she hated having to wait for it. This way of taking the most indirect route to get to a point, just because the person liked the sound of their own voice, seemed to be endemic to Sith. She wasn’t surprised that the Emperor was the master of it. 

“Our flesh is not who we are. I no longer require such crude vessels. At long last, I am truly free.” He disappeared again with the last words, but Alekte knew he was still there. 

“You chose to visit me. Why?” There was no response. Alekte threw his own assertions back at him. “Will you be free when the carbonite poisoning kills me?” 

“Perhaps,” he said, appearing again in front of her. “But that is not my goal. I have done all I can to preserve your life.” 

Alekte could feel the pain returning, spreading from her chest and carving its way through every inch of her. She shuddered, and stumbled back, but kept her feet. “Why?” she growled. 

“You are a part of me I wish to keep.” 

She had no time to try to put words to the revulsion that rose up inside her. A monolith appeared in front of them, and the pain cracked through her body, driving her to her knees. 

The beast roared. 

“I cannot save you unless you want to live.” 

Wracked with pain, even bowed and kneeling before him as he had wanted her to do back in the throne room, Alekte knew she would not yield. She was determined to live, but what he was offering came at a price she was not willing to entertain. She would do this on her own terms, or not at all. And she was stronger than he knew. 

“Sith do not beg for rescue.” She stood slowly, every movement an ordeal. She allowed the pain to run through her, feeding the hate and anger that grew and blossomed in her. “Through passion, I gain strength.” 

“Show me.” 

Alekte lit her sabers in a fury. She resented being made to perform for him, but that was fuel too; she would use any source of passion she could find. She flew toward the monolith with a roar, and in a storm of rage and pain and fire, she brought the beast down. 

Valkorion appeared again in front of her. “You are the only one who has ever matched my will to survive.” There was pride again in his tone, and it infuriated her. 

“Get away from me.” The searing pain had not subsided, and her rage still burned. “Maybe I can’t kill you, but I will find a way to hurt you.” 

“You resist the inevitable,” he said, his tone disgustingly calm. “It is time you face reality.” 

Before she could find out what he meant, there was another jolt. They were in the throne room, above Zakuul. 

Arcann sat on the throne, not moving. Everything in the room was still, as if time had stopped. Valkorion paced slowly across the walkway, in front of two figures who knelt before the dais. Nothing flickered, nothing shifted. Everything was as solid as if it were real. 

“The Eternal Throne. The new seat of power in the galaxy.” Valkorion looked pointedly at one of the kneeling figures. 

Alekte looked, and recognized Darth Vowrawn, kneeling in submission before the Eternal Throne. _No. It isn’t possible._ “It can’t be,” she said in disbelief, trying to work through the chain of events. “I’ve only been gone –“

“Longer than you think,” Valkorion said, cutting her off. 

_How would he know? If he’s been stuck here with me, how would he know? He has to be lying._

Valkorion continued, too proud of himself to stop. “Zakuul has surpassed my expectations. The most powerful fleet in history, and an army of guardians who know the Force is more than light or dark. But my children abuse their power.” 

Alekte recognized the hooded woman she’d briefly seen before. _So she was his, too._ She wondered briefly who their mother must have been – what kind of person would have borne his children willingly, or if she’d had a choice at all? 

“What did you expect?” she asked, not looking for an answer. “You sired offspring, and forgot that dynasties are built on the bones of their founders.” Alekte thought she could see cracks in his carefully calm demeanor, but they disappeared quickly. 

“I was different here,” he said, turning his back to her and going to the very edge of the walkway, staring out at the stars. “Abandoning my past let me experience pleasures I denied myself before. I have known love on Zakuul.” 

“The only thing you love is power,” Alekte spat out. She was not interested in his play for her sympathy, if that was what it was. 

“I care about more than you know,” he said, turning to face her again. “We must deal with my errant son and daughter before they ruin everything.” 

If he thought he cared for something other than power, Alekte did not want to know what it was. Whatever it was, it clearly wasn’t his family, if that was the right word for them. But he seemed to be finally coming close to the point that he’d been hinting at since she first saw him. 

“So that’s why you’re with me,” she said. “I knew you wanted something. You can’t stop them alone.” Alekte felt a small stir of suspicion, but she let it pass. 

“Do not underestimate their threat,” he said. “It will take both of us to undo the damage they can inflict.” 

He was pressing his point, but there was no need. If the scene Alekte saw in front of her was real, she didn’t need his encouragement. She was the Wrath of the Empire, and if it had fallen, it was her duty to raise it up again. 

Suddenly, there was movement. Darth Vowrawn and the man who knelt next to him stood up, and guards led them out of the room. The hooded woman started to follow them, but stopped abruptly. Arcann watched from the throne as she turned toward Alekte. 

Alekte could feel the woman’s power reaching out to her. “Your daughter sees me.” 

Valkorion paced behind her. “Vaylin was always my favorite.” 

She could see why. Vaylin was easily more powerful than her brother. Alekte felt a long, low tremor; she felt as if she were sinking, but she didn’t move. 

“What is it?” Arcann asked, but Vaylin didn’t respond, her attention fixed on Alekte’s position. 

“Interesting,” said Valkorion, still pacing behind her, watching Vaylin the same way he’d watched her – days or weeks or months ago – in that same room. The predator, watching his prey. Alekte wondered what ‘favorite’ really meant. 

Vaylin ignited her lightsaber, her eyes still searching for whatever it was that she sensed. She still faced Alekte, but did not seem to have found her. 

“It’s an illusion,” said Alekte, almost more to convince herself than anything else. “An entertaining nightmare, but that’s all.” 

“No, it is more.” Valkorion had stopped, his predator’s gaze fixed on Vaylin. 

Pain blazed through Alekte an instant before Vaylin stabbed her lightsaber into her chest. All of the pain that Alekte had felt before was reignited, and she fell. 

She fought through the pain as hard as she could. She refused to go down like this. She summoned her hate and her rage but they were candles compared to the deluge of flame that swept through her. It was not her fire, and she could not control it. 

She heard the Emperor, faintly, as darkness rolled over her. 

“We are being reborn.”


	4. Chapter 4

“Lana, cut the pacing. It’s getting to me.”

Lana did not stop. “You aren’t even looking at me.”

“I can _feel_ you,” Koth came back, not missing a beat. “Come help me with this.” He was sitting at a table littered with tools and tiny machine parts, his attention fixed on something that looked like a horrible cross between a blaster and a very large syringe.

 “You seem to have it all well in hand,” said Lana, still pacing.

“Just sit.”

Koth nudged the chair across from him with his foot and it slid toward Lana with a metallic scraping sound that set her teeth on edge. If he was trying to help her, he was off to a poor start. But, with a sigh, Lana sat, shifting irritably as if there were some way to make that cold metal chair comfortable. There was nothing remotely comfortable about anything in the room, but if all went according to plan, they’d have the Lord Wrath – _no, Alekte_ – out of carbonite and safe very soon. And as far as Lana was concerned, that would make her stay in this place worthwhile.

“What do you want me to do?” asked Lana, resigned. She was restless. Trying to meditate hadn’t helped; pacing hadn’t helped; but maybe having something to work on would help her to focus.

Koth handed her a datapad and a case filled with vials. There were small, empty ones; and larger ones that were labeled and filled with various liquids. “Get these set up. There’s a list there of all the dosages and mixtures and whatnot.”

Lana took the filled vials out of the case and set them out on the table, rearranging some of Koth’s mess to give herself space to work. She’d never been much for chemistry, but she could follow a list easily enough, assuming everything was labeled properly.

“Where did you find all this?” she asked, carefully measuring out a liquid that was a startling shade of green.

“A bit here, a bit there,” Koth answered. He looked up from his work, meeting Lana’s uncertain gaze. “It’ll work, Lana. We’ll get your Outlander.” It was the same sort of exchange they’d had dozens of times since they’d met, taking turns on one side of it or the other.

Lana managed a tiny, quick smile, and set to work in earnest. She hoped he was right. The only other times she could remember being as nervous as she was now, on Yavin 4 and on Ziost, Alekte had been with her. She had a way of reminding a person of their strength, somehow; reassuring them and inspiring courage. Lana wasn’t sure how she did it – wasn’t even sure Alekte herself knew how she did it – but it was sorely needed now.

They worked together in silence, and Lana had to admit that the work was helping. The thoughts running through her mind had settled into a steady stream – still loud and rushing, but steady – instead of volatile things flying everywhere like shrapnel. She didn’t envy Alekte the experience she was going to have when all of this stuff she was mixing was shot into her, but it was either this or dragging her bodily out of the Spire only to be caught by Knights and skytroopers.

“So tell me about your Outlander,” Koth said, breaking the silence. “What’s she like?”

“I thought you were tired of those stories,” Lana said, teasing. 

Koth laughed. “Yeah, you’ve told me about what she’s done. Practically got those stories memorized now. But who’s _she_? I mean, she’s got a name at least, right? Or do you really just call her ‘Lord Wrath’?”

“Her name is Alekte Havelan-Quinn,” said Lana absently, consulting the list on the datapad. “And I do call her Lord Wrath, when the situation calls for it.” Darth Alekte, the Wrath of the Empire. Years ago, on Rishi, Lana had asked why Alekte hadn’t taken another name when she was raised to Darth. _Lord Wrath is enough_ , she’d said. _Besides, I have enough trouble with names as it is without having another one of my own to forget_.

Lana leaned back in her chair, trying to think of how to describe Alekte’s personality. “She’s pragmatic and decisive. She likes to get as much information as she can when she’s working on a problem, and she has a way of coming up with questions and solutions that don’t seem to occur to most people.”

“Already told me all that.” Koth picked up one of the small vials Lana had filled and slotted it into the device briefly before removing it again. “Were you friends?”

“Yes. Eventually.” Lana thought back to what Alekte had been like before she’d got to know her. “She’s quite serious at first. It takes her some time to warm up.”

“Will breaking her out of the Spire earn me some points, you think?”

_If this mad plan works_ , thought Lana. “Maybe,” she said, capping off a vial and going back to the list. “But she’s been in carbonite for five years, and we still haven’t found her husband or any of the rest of her people. Things aren’t the same as they were when I knew her.”

“I know,” Koth said. “That’s why I’m asking. We’re gonna be asking a lot from her. Seems like we should try to make things as smooth as possible, you know?”

Lana thought for a moment. “She’s used to having authority. Not just as the Wrath, but as a Sith in the Empire. She’s not terribly diplomatic – or patient, come to that – but she’ll work with people if she can see a purpose to it.”

Koth started picking up the small vials and arranging them in the device. “Good. This is all good, keep it coming.”

“Don’t ask her to do something without being prepared to explain why, thoroughly but succinctly. She will want to know, and I can tell you from experience that she will do things her own way if you don’t give her sufficient reason not to.”

Koth grinned. “Rishi, right? With the pirates?”

Lana nodded, smiling at the memory. She’d been surprised that the pirate ruse had lasted so long, given how much Alekte had fought against it in the beginning. She had come around when she learned the reasons for it, but she had not been at all pleased.

“Anything else?” Koth placed the last vial in the device, then fitted the cover in place.

“There’s nothing else I can think of that’s particular to her,” Lana said. She took the device from Koth and examined it. This would not be a pleasant experience for Alekte. “We just have to hope we all come out of this alive, and then we can take it from there.”

***

Lana stood ready at the open door of Koth’s shuttle, watching the streets and walkways of Zakuul fly by below her as the wind roared in her ears.

“We’re almost at the drop point. You good?” Koth’s voice came over the comm in her ear.

Lana nodded and gave him a thumbs-up. HK-55 stood next to her, ready to confirm her descent. Teeseven had been in the Spire for several days now, somehow evading detection and preparing a series of false alerts and security bypasses that would allow Lana to reach Alekte unobserved. They wouldn’t have much time, and the skytroopers wouldn’t be held off forever, but it would have to be enough.

The shuttle slowed to a stop. “That’s it! Good luck in there.” Before Koth was finished speaking, Lana was out the door.

_May the Force serve us well_ , she thought as she rappelled down to a narrow catwalk. She touched down easily and gave a wave to HK, who signaled to Koth and drew up the line as the shuttle flew away. 

Lana turned around to find Teeseven behind her, standing ready at a huge door and beeping excitedly.

_T7 = ready // Lana = ready?_

“Yes,” replied Lana. “Let’s go.” Despite all the time she’d spent working with Teeseven, Lana never stopped being surprised at how easily this little droid had won her over. But he was quite capable, indispensable really, and his enthusiasm was infectious.

Teeseven opened the door and Lana stepped carefully inside. They’d been fortunate enough to find an accessible entrance close to the carbonite storage where Alekte was. Lana had been surprised that the feared Outlander wasn’t being kept in a vault deeper inside the Spire, but she wasn’t going to question it.

_T7 = knows the way // Lana = follow_

The droid beeped quietly and rolled off down a corridor, pausing before each turn to reassure himself that Lana was still with him. Lana followed close behind, her hand hovering over her lightsaber hilt. The false alerts seemed to have done their job. The place was empty for now, but she wasn’t about to take any chances.

The last corridor led to a door which Teeseven opened quickly. Lana stepped onto a walkway that led to a hub in the middle of a large, cylindrical room several stories tall. Hanging from broad durasteel beams that radiated from the hub like spokes on a wheel were at least two dozen bodies encased in carbonite. She peered up at them, searching for any identifying features, but nearly everything was obscured by the carbonite and the height of the beams.

With a long, low hum, the beams shifted – once, twice – and one of the carbonite slabs moved into the hub. As it was slowly lowered down toward the walkway, Teeseven made a series of satisfied beeps.

_Sith Lord = this one // T7 = found her weapons_

Lana turned to see a panel slide open near Teeseven, revealing a pair of lightsabers that had been stowed away. “Teeseven, well done! Where did you find them?”

_Arcann = had them on display // T7 = liberated them_

The astromech’s chirps were unexpectedly cheerful for describing what must have been a particularly difficult act of larceny. “Thank you,” said Lana, taking up the blaster-syringe device she and Koth had completed the night before. “I know she’ll appreciate it.”

Teeseven chirped appreciatively, then urgently. Lana nodded and turned toward Alekte.

Time was short, she knew, but she walked slowly toward her old friend. The readouts on the frame surrounding her indicated that Alekte was still alive, but deteriorating. Worries and doubts began to creep into Lana’s mind. _What if the carbonite affected her too much? What if she doesn’t remember anything? What if none of this works?_ She let these thoughts run past her like leaves in an icy mountain stream. She acknowledged them, but they would not stop her. There was no point to worrying now; there was only one course, and she would keep to it.

Lana punched a code into a keypad and stepped back as the carbonite began to glow. She took a deep breath and watched as the carbonite slowly melted away. Too slowly. There wasn’t enough time for this. Her impatience flared.

“Wake up. We have to go,” she said, almost pleading.

Alekte’s eyes fluttered, and she stirred.

Lana let the Force flow through her. The icy stream sharpened her senses and steadied her. She hoped Alekte could hear her. “Don’t try to move. You’re dying.” Alekte’s movements stilled, but her eyes darted and she gasped for breath. Lana could feel that familiar strength building as Alekte began to wake, and it filled her with hope. “I may have your cure, but I’m not going to lie. This will hurt.”

_I’m sorry to welcome you back like this_ , she thought as she aimed her device at Alekte’s chest and pulled the trigger.


	5. Chapter 5

Alekte fell to the floor with a scream, clutching at the burning pain in her chest. Every muscle in her body jumped and twitched, and her mind raced out of control. As she struggled to her feet and the room slowly came into focus around her, she heard a familiar voice.

“That wasn’t so bad.”

Alekte, her chest still heaving as she gasped for breath, squinted at the woman in front of her. Nothing about her seemed familiar, but that voice. She knew that voice. “Do I – I know you.”

“Yes. I’m Lana Beniko, and I –“

“Lana!” Alekte cut her off, relieved and happy to see her friend. _But why does she look so different?_ She tried to explain her hesitation, but the words were eluding her, slipping away or jamming together into a useless mess when she tried to catch them. “Yes. You – it’s different.” She gestured vaguely at Lana, hoping that would fill in the gaps.

“Ah. Yes.” Lana said, sounding relieved, and held a pair of lightsaber hilts out to Alekte. “I believe these are yours. Will you be able to fight?”

Alekte’s hands trembled slightly as she reached for her weapons, but her grip was steady when she held them. She nodded to Lana. “Fight, yes. Talk...” She finished with a shrug.

Lana smiled. “Give yourself some time. It’ll come.”

Alekte nodded, hoping that was true. She wasn’t at all certain that it was, but her thoughts came in a series of images and patterns that defied translation. It didn’t matter, anyway. She didn’t need to talk now.

_Vault guards = arriving // Lana + Sith Lord = get ready!_

Alekte had been so focused on Lana that she’d missed the little droid near the entrance to the room. Images of Coruscant, lightsabers in blues and greens, and Theron Shan flashed through her mind as she grasped at her words. “Republic?” she managed, nodding toward Teeseven.

“Teeseven Oh-one agreed to help rescue you. I know it’s not much of a crew, but it’s the best I could manage, so it will have to be enough.” Alekte nodded, her concern and confusion growing as Lana explained. “The Empire and Republic have all but fallen to the man who imprisoned you. You’re our last hope.”

Droids burst into the room, the same ones she’d seen on Darth Marr’s ship, and Alekte grinned, a wicked and terrifying expression. She ignited her lightsabers. She was more than ready to go. Whatever it was that Lana had set to burning through her made her absolutely incapable of standing still.

She eagerly followed Lana as they tore through the droids. Alekte was clumsier with her lightsabers than she would have liked, and moved more slowly, but with Lana’s help, that didn’t seem to matter for the moment.

When they came to a door blocking their way, Alekte found that she was relieved to be able to stop and catch her breath. She leaned against the wall and tried to hide how tired she was from just a short series of fights as Lana worked to open the door. She knew that it would take some time to get back to her normal strength after the carbonite, and she was sure Lana understood that. But Alekte had said she was ready to fight, and she did not want to look weak, or let Lana down when she was counting on her.

After a few moments, Lana stepped back from the door with a sigh. Alekte considered offering her help – between the two of them, they could get it open easily – but the energy running through her felt unstable and the fire in her burned fitfully. She could swing her lightsabers well enough to get through some droids, but taking control of the Force and focusing it was another matter entirely.

“The droid?” Alekte asked. Words were still flying out of her mind faster than she could catch them, and there didn’t seem to be anything she could do to slow them down.

Lana didn’t seem to mind. “Generating false security alerts in other sectors,” she answered. Her comm chimed, and she handed Alekte an earpiece as she answered. “Yes, I read you.”

Alekte fumbled with the earpiece as Lana continued talking to whoever was on the other end. She had never liked this kind of communication, but they couldn’t exactly stop for a holocall when they needed to be on the move.

“—find the Outlander yet?” The voice over the comm was clear, at least, but the accent was unfamiliar. And she had no idea who or what an Outlander was. But Lana’s response answered that question for her.

“Yes, I’ve patched her in,” Lana said, nodding to Alekte.

“Great. I’m Koth Vortena. Welcome to the most suicidal rescue mission in history,” came the voice over the comm. “Hope you’re everything Lana said you were.”

This raised a whole host of new questions. _Why am I the Outlander, what_ is _an Outlander, why is this suicidal, and what in every last one of the hells is going on?_

“Be patient, Koth. We’re on our way,” Lana said, and clicked off the comm. “Koth will fly us out of here as soon as we’re through this door,” she said, her eyes drifting up over Alekte’s shoulder.

Behind her, a screen on the console next to the door which had only shown static before now showed the room they had come from. Alekte recognized the hooded woman who walked slowly into view, but couldn’t seem to find her name.

“We’re not ready yet,” Lana said quietly, going back to the door. “Not for Vaylin.”

_Vaylin. The Emperor’s daughter._ Alekte nodded in agreement, her stomach clenching, and gestured to the door. “Then…”

With what Alekte could tell was a great effort, Lana opened the door wide enough for Alekte to sprint through, and dove past her as the door crashed shut behind them.

As they fought their way through another series of hallways filled with droids – _skytroopers, Lana had called them_ – Alekte could hear Lana talking to Koth and Teeseven over the comms, but energy was bursting through her and even though she was tiring quickly, she couldn’t make herself slow down and listen. She’d made it this far, somehow; she was not going to let it all end with being captured again, or killed.

Koth’s voice called urgently over the comm. “Hope you’re not too close yet!”

Lana ducked around a corner with Alekte close behind. “What’s happening?” Lana demanded.

“Nothing I can’t handle, but we need to move the pickup!” Koth said.

_Move? Where? And how far?_ Alekte thought, scanning the hallway behind her for any signs of pursuit.

“We don’t have time for this,” said Lana, looking almost as on edge as Alekte felt.

 “Well, if I land now, I’ll be shot to pieces. So just think of it as a personal favor to me, huh?” Koth said. “Duck through another tower and I’ll find you.”

“Just…hurry,” said Alekte. She was exhausted; she wanted to get home, back to her crew, back to Malavai. And she could feel Vaylin getting closer. There was no time to lose.

“Trying to!” Koth said. “Always love our little excursions, Lana. Back with you shortly,” he finished, and closed the connection.

“Who is this?” Alekte asked, gesturing toward her earpiece. It was Lana’s own business if she wanted to work with people who talked to her this way, but Alekte did not have the patience for it just now.

“Koth is a native of Zakuul. Ex-military. Emperor Arcann wields great power now, but not all of his people support him blindly.” Lana’s tone was gentle, and a little pleading.

The last time she’d spoken to Alekte like this, she’d been talking her into working with a Republic SIS agent.

Alekte nodded slowly, the pieces starting to fit into place. But before she could ask any questions, Lana urged her forward and onto a lift. Alekte stared out the windows as the lift moved, at the spires she’d only ever seen from far above the planet’s surface. It did not look at all like she had expected, but as she was trying to work out the improbable architecture, she could feel Lana watching her.

“What?” Alekte said as she turned to face her.

“It’s…good to see you,” Lana said with a little smile, and Alekte almost thought she saw her blush.

“You too,” Alekte said, smiling. In all the rush to get out of wherever it was she had been, Alekte had not had a chance to realize just how happy she was to see Lana. She missed Malavai terribly, and the rest of her crew; but in the time they’d worked together, Lana had become a very dear friend. “I have so many questions,” she said, thankful that while energy still ran like a torrent through her body, her mind had slowed just enough for her to put together more than two words at a time.

“I know,” said Lana, standing ready at the door. “But the answers will have to wait.”

They exited the lift into another building. Skytroopers blocked their path, but they were taken down easily, with Lana doing more and more of the work on that front. Alekte could still feel Vaylin following them, and she began to doubt whether they could escape her. Vaylin seemed to move with a certainty and patience that came from knowing she was much stronger than anything that might challenge her, and for all Alekte knew, she was right. She was certainly far and away more powerful than anyone else Alekte had encountered, except the Emperor himself. And she was coming for her.

She tried not to think about it as she and Lana left the building and ran across the bridge to the next one. The energy from whatever Lana had shot into her was fading, very slowly but still fading, and Alekte could feel fatigue creeping in around the edges. Not just fatigue, but heavy, bone-deep exhaustion that threatened to drop her where she stood.

She fought on, lagging behind Lana as they entered the next building. Just as the door closed behind them, something massive crashed against it. The whole building shook, and she could hear something rumbling close by. Alarms began to sound, loud and piercing.

“What was that?”

“It’s Vaylin,” Lana said, pulling Alekte to her feet. “She’ll bring the whole city crashing down on you if she has to.”

Koth’s voice came over the comm. “Lana? Are my scanners glitched? Did you just charge headfirst into a skytrooper droid factory?”

“Vaylin’s almost on us. We’re out of options!” answered Lana.

 “This is Altair Three all over again,” said Koth.

Alekte had no idea what Altair Three meant, but with her temporary energy fading, she called on the Force. It felt strange here, but she pulled it in around her and the fire inside her roared to life, still slightly unsteady but strong enough.

“We can do this,” she said. After all of this, she refused to be trapped. Not again.

The rumbling and alarms continued as they fought their way through the skytroopers that seemed to appear out of nowhere. With the Force running through her, Alekte felt stronger than she had before, but the noise and vibration tugged at her focus in a way she couldn’t shake. She could hear a message being broadcast through the building, something about a reactor core. It was almost impossible for her to sort out the words through all the confusion, but judging by the people rushing past them, it wasn’t anything good.

Everything was coming in at once. The alarms were piercing, the rumbling battered her, the screams and frantic movement of the people in this place jumped at her. There was no clear line through the chaos. Alekte knew if she didn’t find a way out of it soon, it would all overwhelm her and she would be worse than useless. She needed to stop, and needed to keep going; she was finding it increasingly difficult to do either one, but Lana rushed her onward, through another door.

Alekte didn’t know what a reactor core was supposed to look like, but she was fairly certain that the roiling, expanding ball of fire she saw on the other side of the door was not right. The place was empty of people except for a few who ran past them into the building they’d come from. In the open space, the alarms weren’t as penetrating, and the chaos in Alekte’s head began to clear.

Then Koth shouted over the comm. “What happened to that reactor?” The sudden noise was like a spike through Alekte’s brain. She snatched the comm out of her ear as the chaos rushed back in. She turned away from Lana and wrung her hands vigorously, trying to give it an outlet as Lana explained to Koth what had happened.

“That was Vaylin. And please stop shouting.” Lana put her hand on Alekte’s shoulder and gave her a concerned look.

Alekte nodded at her, taking a few deep breaths as her hands gradually slowed. She wasn’t comfortable with anyone but Malavai seeing her in this state, but she knew Lana had seen it at least once, on Ziost. It had been worse there, but even if it was less severe, it was still a loss of control, and she could never be sure who might use it against her.

“There’s nothing we can do here,” Lana said as Alekte put the comm back in her ear.

“You can still shut it down!” Koth said. He wasn’t shouting anymore, but his tone was urgent, and the shouting was only barely held back. Alekte winced as he continued to speak; the sensation was dulled now, but still painful.

“Koth. Stop,” Alekte said in a low, flat tone. “If we shut – if we do, the noise stops. Yes?” Her words came haltingly, each one still an effort.

“Yeah, I guess,” he said. Alekte couldn’t read his tone, but he didn’t sound happy, and she couldn’t tell why.

“Do you know how? Can you tell me?” Alekte asked. She had no experience at all with reactors or anything like them, but if she was going to be any use to Lana, she needed the noise to stop. Whatever other reasons Koth had for shutting the reactor down were secondary to her.

“What are you doing? We need to get you out of here, now!” said Lana.

“Yes!” Koth shouted over the comm. Alekte stiffened and took in a sharp breath. “Sorry. Sorry, yeah, I can talk you through it.”

“Right. Go.” Alekte gave Lana an apologetic look as Koth directed them to a control station on the next floor. She wanted to explain her reasoning, but she didn’t have enough room in her mind just then to listen to Koth’s instructions and find the words for Lana at the same time.

“Okay. So you got a big control panel in front of you, right?” Koth said as they reached their destination.

“Yes. What now?” Alekte asked. Lana was pacing behind her, and Alekte could feel her growing impatience.

“On the left there’s a keypad. Hit the blue button at the top, and put in the code aurek-dorn-two-seven.”

The screen flashed red when Alekte entered the code. “It’s all red. Flashing red on the screen.”

“Shit, okay. Uh…okay, blue button again, then cresh-cresh-three-niner.”

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Koth?” Lana demanded.

“Yes, I am, Lana. Just relax,” Koth said, but there was no chance of that happening. As Alekte entered the second code, a massive surge burst through a tower behind the panel, shattering it.

Alekte jumped back, nearly crashing into Lana. “The panel’s gone, Koth,” Lana said. “Relaxing didn’t work so well. Now what do you propose to do?”

“Quickly, Koth,” Alekte added. The rumbling was even worse now, and she was rapidly losing what little patience she had.

“Okay. There’s a group of rods behind the panel. If you can blow those out, it should get the whole thing shut down.”

“Should?” said Alekte, eyeing the rods Koth had described.

“It’s the quickest way I know,” he said.

“Then why didn’t you start with that?” asked Lana.

“Because the other way was a whole lot safer,” Koth answered.

“This is pure insanity!” Lana shouted at both of them as Alekte ignited a lightsaber. There was probably something in a control panel somewhere that would blow out the rods, but she didn’t have the time to find it, and a lightsaber would work as well as anything.

Electricity bled off the rods and arced between them, but they looked fragile enough. _It can’t be worse than Sith lightning_ , Alekte thought as she shattered the rods with one stroke.

The shockwave that followed put out all the lights around her and knocked her back and onto the floor. But after a brief burst, the rumbling finally began to subside and the alarms changed to a less piercing tone.

Alekte lay on the floor for a few moments, her eyes closed as the chaos in her mind began to subside. When she opened her eyes, she saw Lana standing over her, looking as irritated as she’d ever seen her.

“Never do that to me again,” she said, as she offered a hand to help Alekte to her feet.

“Sorry,” she said, her mind calmer now but still spinning. “I’ll explain it later.”

Dull yellow emergency lights lit the way as they went toward the shuttle landing pads. There were no skytroopers for the moment, but Alekte could still feel Vaylin’s presence. Her sense of time had always been shaky at best, and she had no idea how long it had been since the carbonite, but if she’d learned anything at all in that time, it was that there were always more skytroopers somewhere.

“Koth, where are you?” Lana said as they stood on a platform overlooking the darkened city.

“Ran into sort of a maintenance issue,” he answered.

Lana closed her eyes. “How bad is it?” she asked with a sigh.

“Not great, but we’re on top of it. Give us three minutes?”

Koth closed the comm and Lana pinched the bridge of her nose, shaking her head. “’Three minutes’ is never really ‘three minutes’ with Koth,” she said. “Right. Let’s find a place to lie low and—“

Alekte shook her head and nodded toward the skytroopers that were approaching behind Lana.

“Vaylin’s nothing if not persistent,” Lana muttered as she ignited her lightsaber and headed down the catwalk with Alekte close behind.

There were suspiciously few skytroopers as they fought their way toward the nearest landing pad. As she ran her lightsabers through the last one, Alekte looked around warily. She could feel something else coming closer, much closer than Vaylin.

“Where are the rest?” she asked, but before Lana could offer an answer, they heard something over the comm.

“Koth?” Lana said. “Is that blaster fire?”

“Almost there!” Koth called. “Three more minutes!”

“Koth, we don’t have three more minutes,” Lana said as two soldiers, with the same pikes and gold armor as Alekte had seen in the Spire, dropped from a shuttle that flew by.

_The skytroopers must have been a scouting party_ , Alekte thought. _These soldiers are meant to keep us busy until Vaylin arrives_. Vaylin was steadily coming closer, and Alekte suspected that she didn’t care what happened to the soldiers, as long as they kept her target from moving. But there was no way around them, and even with Lana’s help, she didn’t know if she could make short enough work of two at once.

“Two and a half!” Koth said, and the soldiers advanced.

“Outlander!” one of them shouted. “You are guilty of assassinating the Immortal Emperor, and of evading imprisonment. We demand your immediate surrender!”

Alekte tried to process the logic behind the accusation of assassinating someone who was supposed to be immortal as Lana spoke.

“Knights of Zakuul,” she said. “A policing body under Vaylin’s charge. Force sensitives.”

“More like us, or the Jedi?” Alekte asked. _Knights and Scions, then. Right._

“To them, the Force is an instrument to be used in the pursuit of justice. Nothing more.”

_How…lifeless._ Alekte almost felt sorry for them.

The Knight interrupted her thoughts. “Stop talking, disarm, and surrender at once!”

Alekte almost laughed. “You’ve mistaken me for a Jedi,” she said, slowly and carefully. “I do not surrender.” She glanced at Lana, who gave her an encouraging smile as she kept her eyes on the Knights.

“Then you give us no choice,” said the Knight. “Take them by force!”

The energy from whatever Lana had given her was beginning to crack now, and the exhaustion was bleeding through, but the Force bolstered her and her fire burned more steadily now. She was still weaker than she had been in a very long time, but while Lana, graceful and deadly, fought one of the Knights, Alekte managed to keep the other occupied until he jumped away in retreat.

“Tanek! Run! We’ll fight another day!” he shouted from a catwalk above them. Alekte felt a surge of pride that, even in her weakened state, she was able to inspire enough fear and uncertainty to send her enemy running.

But Lana had disarmed Tanek and she held him in a tight grip above her, choking him with the Force. Alekte had never had the chance to see this side of her before – relentless, predatory, toying with her victim.

And she loved it. It filled her with pride, admiration, strength…and something else. Something undefined, something she’d only ever felt with Malavai, and she had no idea what to do with it now.

“You Knights,” Lana said, in a low and mocking tone that sent a shiver through Alekte. “You’re never taught to properly channel your anger.”

“Lana,” Alekte said as she stepped in next to her friend, encouraging her to do what she knew she wanted to do.

Lana never took her eyes off of the Knight, but she nodded, and a cruel and beautiful smile bloomed on her face. She released him, only to run him through with her lightsaber not half a moment later.

“That won’t be the last Knight we encounter,” Lana said, turning to face Alekte.

“Let them come,” she said. She was drained, but she fed off Lana’s strength and passion, and with her, she felt unstoppable.

Lana laughed. “You’d have your work cut out for you, I can assure you of that.”

Suddenly, the catwalk above them came crashing down. They jumped out of the way just in time to see it land where they had been standing with such force that it brought that one down too, sending the massive sheets of durasteel falling to the streets below.

_Vaylin._ She was here. She’d found them.

She walked toward them slowly. She had them cornered at the end of what remained of the catwalk; there was no need for her to hurry.

“I don’t know you,” Vaylin said, looking at Lana. She turned to Alekte. “But you. I’ve seen you.”

Skytroopers landed behind her, one after the other, an entire platoon. Alekte looked around for some kind of way out, anything she could use. Vaylin may have thought she had them trapped, but Alekte refused to be caught.

“I’ll hold her off as long as I can,” Lana said, stepping in front of Alekte. “The first chance you get, go.”

Vaylin was a threat to be countered, but Lana’s suggestion was absolutely absurd. “I’m done running,” Alekte said, fire raging through her voice. “I’m not going anywhere without you.”

“You’re impossible,” Lana said through gritted teeth, but Alekte thought she could feel something in her that was not quite relief, but nothing Alekte could name.

Ahead of them, the skytroopers raised their rifles, and Vaylin ignited her lightsaber. But instead of attacking, she regarded it for a moment with unnerving calm.

“No…I won’t need that,” she said as the blade died and she returned the hilt to her belt. Sparks began to jump and electricity arced off of all the platforms and catwalks around them, effectively cutting off all avenues of escape.

Except one.

“Heads down, eyes open, run like hell!” came Koth’s voice over the comm as his shuttle appeared behind them, firing on Vaylin and the skytroopers.

Alekte didn’t need to be told twice. She and Lana ran for it, as Vaylin tore up the floor they’d been standing on to shield herself against the blaster bolts that took down the skytroopers behind her. The shuttle was close, and Lana easily leapt across to the ramp.

But as Koth stopped firing and Alekte followed, Vaylin threw her shield and hit the wing, knocking the shuttle and the ramp out of place just as Alekte landed. She stumbled, nearly losing her footing, and was only saved from falling by a droid who grabbed her arm, nearly pulling it out of it socket.

“Declaration: Meatbags can’t fly,” it said.

“Hang on, I’m gonna punch it!” Koth called, and Alekte ran into the shuttle, the ramp pulling up behind her and the droid.

“Thanks,” she said as she arrived in the cockpit, and leaned against the wall, her fatigue catching up with her.

“Don’t thank me yet,” he said, glancing back at her briefly. “We’re not even close to safe.”

Through the window, Alekte could see massive guns aiming at them, and Koth flew through the fire. But as quickly as it started, it stopped again, and soft astromech beeps came over the comm.

_Guns = offline // T7 = start new mission_

“Thank you, Teeseven. We owe you one,” said Lana.

 “Lament: No one has thanked me,” said the droid behind her.

Alekte turned to have a good look at it. It looked familiar, but she couldn’t place it. And she wasn’t accustomed to thanking droids for doing what they were supposed to do, but if Lana was doing it…

“Thank you,” she said simply, feeling very strange about it.

“Humility: It was nothing,” the droid responded.

“Right,” she said, turning back to Lana and Koth. It was time for some answers.

“Where are Captain Quinn and the rest of my crew?” she asked Lana. “Why aren’t they here?”

“My lord…” Lana started, her tone unsettlingly calm.

_Oh, no._

“It’s gonna be a short trip,” Koth said quietly. “Might want to start briefing your friend here on what’s been going on the last five years.”

_No._

Alekte dropped onto the jump seat behind her. “Five years?” she exhaled, looking desperately at Lana as she knelt beside her.

“Yes,” Lana said, taking Alekte’s hand. “I know, it’s a lot to take, but I promise I will answer all the questions you have, as best I can.”

Alekte nodded, but she barely heard Lana’s words. She had questions, thousands of them, but no words for any of them. Her mind flooded with worries and fears; images of Malavai, Vette, the rest of her crew; her mother; the Empire; everyone and everything she’d known. She couldn’t make sense of any of it, but Lana squeezed her hand and gave her a comforting smile, and Alekte found a spark of strength and resolve buried under everything else.


	6. Chapter 6

“Bail out!”

They’d barely made it away from the Spire before the ship started to catch fire. Teeseven had disabled the guns that had been shooting at them, but not before they’d landed a few hits.

And now they were crashing in a swamp. Alekte began to see why Koth had called this mission ‘suicidal’. Fortunately, they were able to get clear of the burning shuttle with only bruises, scrapes, and a bit of singed armor between them.

“That’s two more shuttles you owe me,” said Koth, walking ahead as they made their way toward the downed craft to salvage what they could.

“You didn’t even own this one,” said Lana. “It really shouldn’t count.”

“It was mine when it crashed,” Koth said, kicking aside some wreckage. “It counts.”

Alekte didn’t care who owed how many shuttles to whom, if it wasn’t going to get them out of there. She stayed near Lana as they dug through the shuttle’s remains, pulling out the odd supplies and other useful bits as they found them. Koth was still a puzzle to her. She’d never had much trouble talking to unfamiliar people as long as she was recognized as Sith. It wasn’t that she needed the deference or fear that her status inspired – though she had to admit she did enjoy it more often than not – but it did give her a familiar structure to work with. Koth was well outside that structure, though, and that uncertainty was too much for her.

“Do we know anything about this place?” she asked, directing her question to Lana.

But Koth answered. “Not much to it,” he said, stamping out a small flame before it could spread to his coat. “Barely populated, some old ruins scattered around, the usual grumpy wildlife you’d expect.” He walked over to add a few medkits to the small pile of things Lana and Alekte had found. “People call it the Endless Swamp.”

“Endless?” asked Lana, with a skeptical look.

“It’s an old name. People were more dramatic back then,” Koth said with a shrug.

_Were they more stupid, too? How can it be endless if it’s only one planet? They must have known about other planets. Then again, if it was named before they had any real cities, I suppose it could well have seemed endless._ Alekte let these trivial thoughts run on and on as she made a full circle around the wreckage, looking for anything they might have missed. She needed all the distraction she could find to keep her from dwelling on her current situation.

Finally, she came up next to HK. “Anything on your sensors?” she asked.

“Confirmation: I’ve detected a large metallic object nearby,” said the droid. “Analysis suggests a technological construct, but there are no energy readings.”

“Whatever it is, it’s got better chances of flying than this thing,” said Koth.

“Why do you think it’s a ship?” asked Alekte, giving Koth a quick glance over her shoulder.

Koth shrugged. “Not a lot of other possibilities for a ‘large technological construct’ out here.” His voice had that same unhappy and strangely confrontational tone Alekte had heard from him before, but she still had no idea what it meant.

“Skytroopers won’t be far behind us,” said Lana, moving the small pile of salvaged equipment well away from the wreck. “We need to hide the evidence of our landing.”

“I’ll scavenge, you bury?” Koth said.

“Just like Arron Prime,” answered Lana.

Alekte looked between the two of them. How many places had they been, how many wrecks like this, and why? To find her? “You’ve been working together for a while, haven’t you?” she asked, not sure of the phrasing of her question.

“Long enough,” said Koth, digging deeper into the wreckage.

“I know you have more questions than answers, but we really should keep moving,” said Lana. “I promise, I’ll tell you everything I can as soon as we’re safe.”

Before Alekte could protest, HK appeared next to her. “Enthusiasm: Shall we investigate the technological object? I believe I can guide us to its location.”

Alekte glanced back at Lana, who nodded at her. “Very well,” she said with a sigh, and she and the droid set off.

*********

Lana gave a small sigh of relief as she watched Alekte and HK walk away into the swamp. She was not looking forward to the conversation she knew she had to have with her friend. She’d said she would give her answers, and she planned to, but she was glad to postpone it for now.

“She gonna be okay?” Koth asked, once Alekte and HK were out of earshot.

_What kind of question is that?_ “She’ll be fine,” Lana answered, digging out a hole with a conveniently shaped piece of debris. “And she has HK with her. There’s nothing to worry about.”

“No, I meant –“ Koth broke off, almost losing his footing as he dragged a large piece of what had been the shuttle’s wing over to Lana. “She took that ‘five years’ thing pretty hard.”

“Yes, and I do wish you had let me handle that,” said Lana, glancing up at him.

“Sorry. I guess – I thought she already knew.”

“How would she have known, exactly?” asked Lana, incredulous.

Koth shrugged. “I thought you told her.”

“I didn’t have a chance, did I?” said Lana, piling bits of shuttle into the shallow hole. “And even if I had, imagine if she’d had that reaction while we were trying to get out of the Spire.”

“Okay, I get it. I’m sorry.”

Lana sighed. “If you’re so keen to apologize to someone, apologize to her.” _Not that there’s any point to it now. It happened; best to just move past it._

“Yeah. If I can get her to talk to me.” Koth said, going back to dig through the debris.

Lana stopped her work and stared at Koth. “What are you talking about?”

“I don’t get the sense she likes me,” he said, digging up a half-burned case of ration bars.

“She just met you,” Lana said, trying to be patient. She was diplomatic, but Koth seemed to fall all over himself sometimes to get people to like him. “I did mention that she takes some time to warm up to new people.”

Koth gave her a skeptical look. “So that thing with not looking at a person she’s talking to, that’s just, what? A Sith thing?”

“Just her. I’ve never learned the reason for it, if there is one, but she reacted to Theron the same way when we first started working together.” Lana had to admit that Alekte had her idiosyncrasies, which was not at all uncommon for Sith, but they did seem to be more apparent now.

“How’d that go?”

“A bit rough at first, but he was a Republic agent, which I will note you’re not.”

“So I got that going for me.” Koth sighed, apparently unconvinced.

“Yes. She got on with him, and she’ll get on with you. Just give her some time.”

*********

Alekte had no idea where she was. She and HK had slogged through the swamp, investigating several things that seemed to have nothing to do with whatever the droid had picked up on its sensors, all while dodging the local wildlife. And a blasted rancor. Finding one all the way out here made Alekte wonder if they were just an immutable fact of the galaxy. She was irritated; her feet were wet, she was cold, and the only person she knew was somewhere back the way she had come, the Force only knew where. She just wanted to go home.

_If there’s anything left of it_ , she thought bitterly, then shoved that line of thinking away before it went any further.

As they neared a clearing, Alekte could see something massive ahead of her. She couldn’t quite tell what it was from where she stood, but she doubted there was anything larger nearby.

“Is this the object you picked up on your sensors?” she asked HK.

“Confirmation: Yes, master,” the droid said. “A closer scan suggests that this object has been here for several centuries.”

_Centuries? But how?_ Alekte passed the trees and carefully picked her way down the ledge to get a closer look.

It almost looked like it might have been a starship, once upon a time, but it wasn’t like any ship Alekte had seen. And the droid’s estimate of ‘centuries’ was almost certainly correct – the thing was well settled into the mud, with plants and trees growing up all around it and long vines hanging from what must have been the engine bells. She didn’t see how this drowned and derelict ship was any better than the one they’d left behind.

Alekte could see Lana and Koth making their way down the ledge as she and HK completed their circuit of the ship. She was dismayed to see Lana walking away from her while Koth approached her with an expectant look on his face.

“HK says it’s been here for centuries,” she offered, staring up at the ship. Her thumb traced and twisted along the fingers of her right hand, out of Koth’s line of vision. It was still uncomfortable to talk to him, but with him there, looking at her, the awkward silence was worse.

“Centuries?” he said, looking down the length of the ship. “Of all the junk out here, you had to find the antique.”

_What does that mean? Isn’t this what you wanted me to find?_ Koth’s tone was completely unreadable to her, but before she could respond, HK interjected.

“Observation: Visible design elements do not match any from Zakuulan culture, antique or modern.”

“Not from Zakuul…?” Koth trailed off, and almost ran in through the open port on the side of the ship.

“He doesn’t overthink things,” said Lana, coming up beside Alekte, to her great relief.

“No,” said Alekte. “How could this go unnoticed for such a long time?”

Before Lana could answer, Koth came bounding up to them. “Do you have any idea what this is?”

“Besides an old starship?” asked Alekte.

“This is the Gravestone!” he said, grinning. “This was the only ship that ever went up against the Eternal fleet and won. Do you have any idea how long people have been looking for this thing?” His words tumbled out almost too quickly to be understood, but something in the way he spoke kindled a spark of recognition in Alekte.

“And we just happened to stumble upon it?” said Lana.

Alekte nodded in agreement with Lana. “Why is it here, in a swamp, while the Fleet is still out there?”

Koth’s pace slowed only slightly. “The fleet’s even older than Valkorion, maybe even older than Zakuul. The battles happened centuries ago, and nobody knows all the details of the whole war.” He turned away from them, looking up at the ship. “But every story talks about the Gravestone – one ship with the firepower to take on the Eternal fleet. This is fate.”

Lana and Alekte shared a skeptical look, but Koth was still going as he turned back to them.

“We get your Outlander,” – Alekte bristled at that title – “find exactly the weapon we need…we’re going to win this thing, Lana. It’s destiny.”

Before Koth could start in again, Lana spoke. “It’s certainly no coincidence, but destiny? I think there’s something else going on here.”

“I agree with Lana,” said Alekte. “I don’t think it’s destiny.” _Are all Zakuulans like this?_

Koth shrugged, but Alekte could still sense the excitement running through him. “Believe what you want. I’ll take what fate sends my way,” he said, and took a few quick steps toward the port. “Let’s have a look inside, huh?”

HK spoke up as the four of them headed down into the ship. “Assessment: Nearby signs of animal activity suggest local predators may be using this wreck as a nesting ground. Caution is advised.”

“Right,” said Lana. “We’ll split up, deal with any wildlife, and then regroup to plan our next move.”

HK had been correct about the nesting ground, but nothing they encountered posed a challenge, and they were able to clear the decks – those that were accessible – easily. Once actually inside, Alekte was surprised to find that it was more or less intact. There was the odd plant coming up through a grate, and it was certainly in need of some cleaning and repairs, but it seemed to be structurally sound.

_Malavai would be fascinated by this_ , she thought. A dull, permeating ache of longing settled into her as she thought of him, but instead of chasing it away, she held on to it and let it fuel her.

She remembered the moment when she knew she loved him. After months of humoring her idle questions and her endless fascination with seemingly trivial things, he had offered, out of nowhere, to show her the inner details of how her own ship worked. And as he painstakingly went through each circuit, each array, Alekte had begun to realize that he hadn’t merely been humoring her all this time; that he was just as interested in the tiny workings of things as she was. It was the first time she had ever found anyone whose mind worked at all like hers, who didn’t try to quell her interest in things, and it was precious to her.

She missed him more than she could possibly express.

“So this ship has been here for a thousand years? More?” Alekte asked, once their group was together again.

”Right,” said Koth. “It’s amazing that it’s in such good shape, considering.”

_‘Amazing’ is the least of it_ , thought Alekte.

“Judging by the damage I’ve seen, the stories are true,” continued Koth. “Whoever built the Gravestone scuttled it themselves after the Eternal Fleet was defeated. It wasn’t shot down.”

“The Fleet was defeated, but not destroyed,” Lana explained to Alekte as they continued walking through the ship. “Valkorion brought it back, under his own control, more than a century ago.”

“Exactly,” Koth said, his excitement building again. “The Eternal Fleet is totally automated. Nobody knows who first built it, and every theory is crazier than the last. But no matter where it came from, the Eternal Fleet is practically unstoppable, and Arcann controls every single ship from the Throne.”

“So if we defeat Arcann,” Alekte said, “the Eternal Fleet isn’t a problem anymore?” _And I can go home?_

“So long as the Throne goes to someone other than his sister, yes,” said Lana. “Regardless, we have many other things to discuss. I owe you five years’ worth of explanations.”

Alekte nodded, suddenly nervous at the prospect.

“And I’m going to need some parts to get this thing moving again,” said Koth.

“We’ll go out and see if we can find some supplies and fresh water,” said Lana. “Koth, see if you can come up with a list of what you need, and we can get to work on it when we come back.”

“You got it,” said Koth.

Alekte followed Lana out of the ship and into the swamp. She had been promised explanations, but now that she was here, she was not at all sure she was ready for them.


	7. Chapter 7

Lana and Alekte walked along in silence, out of the _Gravestone_ and into the swamp. Alekte’s mind was filled with questions, but she found herself unable to articulate any of them. She desperately wanted to know where Malavai was, but she knew that if Lana had been able to find him, he would have been there with her, at her side where he belonged. She didn’t want to think about what it meant that he was not here.

“Right,” said Lana, finally. “I suppose I’d better start at the beginning.”

“I was there for that part,” said Alekte. “When Darth Marr and I faced Valkorion, we knew right away that he was the Emperor. _Our_ Emperor.” Alekte didn’t consider him to be _her_ anything, or Lana’s for that matter, except her enemy. But the distinction was necessary.

“I know,” said Lana. “When you struck him down, it sent ripples through the Force. Everyone who had felt his presence in the past...we all sensed what had happened.”

“Then you know about Darth Marr, too,” Alekte said quietly.

“Yes,” said Lana, as they approached a water station. “Arcann invaded soon after, claiming that an ‘Outlander’ had assassinated his father, the ‘Immortal Emperor’. It didn’t take us long to unravel the truth.”

“So you knew I was still alive?” Alekte asked, suddenly hopeful.

Lana hesitated. “I hadn’t sensed your death, and more importantly, neither had your apprentice,” she finally answered. “But there was no evidence that you’d survived, either. The last I’d heard, you were officially considered missing.”

_Not dead, then. That’s something_. “Was there any official response from the Empire? Has anyone else been looking for me?”

“Your people did try, I know that much,” Lana said, handing Alekte a datapad as she started the machine. “But you have to understand, we’d just learned what had happened when Arcann sent the Eternal Fleet to attack. There was no time for an inquiry, a search, any of that.”

A cold dread settled over Alekte, making her hands shake and her words freeze. She forced herself to speak. “Lana, when you say…they _did_ try…do you…” Her mouth went dry as her words jammed together in an icy mass.

“What?” Lana said, her expression turning from confused to startled. “No! No, that isn’t what I meant at all. I’m so sorry.” She stepped close to Alekte, taking one of her hands in both of her own. “I haven’t found them yet, but there is even less evidence for any of their deaths than there was for yours. I found you, and we will find them, too.”

Alekte nodded and passed the datapad back to her. The dread was gone, but it had taken with it any ability to focus for the time being. “The attack. What happened?” she asked, fighting to pull herself back together.

“It was devastating. The Eternal Fleet came out of nowhere. The first targets, shipyards and rallying points on both sides, were destroyed within days,” Lana said. “They favored ambush tactics throughout the war. Zakuulan sensor technology has far greater range than our own, and their ships can fly much farther on fewer resources.”

“And we had nothing that could go up against them?” asked Alekte. Anger began to fill her now, pure and somehow calming, and her shattered focus began to rebuild.

“The only ships that had any chance at all were the ones retrofitted with isotope-5, but they could only outrun them,” Lana answered. “None could truly compete.”

“How is it possible that all of this stayed hidden for so long?”

“No one really knows the answer to that,” said Lana, tapping the datapad. “It’s obvious that the Emperor’s influence played a part, but aside from that…” She scrolled through the data that was appearing on the screen. “It’s no good here. Let’s keep moving.”

Alekte was only too happy to be on the move again. She could feel that familiar electric energy building inside her, seeking an outlet, and her fingers twitched. She almost hoped to find skytroopers looking for them, but anything in that swamp that was foolish enough to cross her path would do.

Lana caught on right away. “You look like you could use a fight,” she said with a smile.

Alekte flashed a quick, tense smile of her own. “Yes.”

Lana pointed to a small pack of mawvorrs that were roaming around another water station. “It’s not much, but they’re all yours.”

Alekte ignited her sabers and leapt into the beasts, drawing them away from the station as Lana followed at an almost leisurely pace, watching her. It was hardly a challenge, but Alekte attacked with everything she had. She desperately needed this release, and once the pack lay dead on the ground, she rejoined Lana. She could still feel the energy vibrating through her, but it was much steadier now.

“How do you feel?” asked Lana, tinkering with the machine.

“Ready for another, but better,” Alekte answered.

“There’s no shortage of targets around here,” Lana said with a laugh. “And I think we can manage a few small detours if you need them.”

“Good,” Alekte said, rubbing her thumb along her fingers as she looked out over the swamp. She would take all the fights she could get. She needed to rebuild her strength if nothing else; there was a war to win, and she was the Wrath. “You said before that the Empire had fallen to Arcann. How did that happen? How long did it take?”

“Not long. Within three months, the bulk of our naval forces were disabled or eliminated, and the Republic was in the same situation.” Lana recounted the events calmly and steadily as she worked, but Alekte could sense that she was just as unhappy to be delivering this news as Alekte was to be hearing it. “With naval superiority, Arcann’s forces began choking off supply lines, trade, any ship travel at all. Dromund Kaas and Coruscant were both blockaded by the end of the first year.”

“What about the Dark Council?” Alekte almost dreaded hearing the answer, but this time, she held that dread in a tight grip and did not let it overtake her.

“They fought of course, ruthlessly, but they lost.” Lana stood, taking up the datapad again. “Nearly all of them are gone now. The treaty with Zakuul was ultimately negotiated by the Minister of Logistics.”

Alekte stared at Lana, shocked. She felt something tugging at her for a moment, then it was gone. _It was real, then._ “Darth Vowrawn? Lana, I saw that. When I was in carbonite.”

“Really?” said Lana. “What else did you see?”

Alekte brought her hand up close to her chest, her thumb still running along her fingers, and she was silent for a moment. “Nothing specific. Ships burning, Kaas City destroyed. I thought they were just nightmares, but…”

“I see,” said Lana, her gaze steady on her friend. “Come on. We’ll find something to fight on the way to the next one.”

They didn’t have to look very hard for that. As they turned a corner around a rocky outcropping, they could see a rancor not far in front of them. Alekte didn’t know if it was the same one she’d avoided earlier; she had no idea where she was in this swamp and if there was another one of those things here, she was not interested in meeting it just now.

“Come with me on this one?” Alekte said, immediately leaping ahead, lightsabers blazing.

Lana called after her as she followed, but Alekte barely heard her. Once she decided to fight, she didn’t think she could stop, even if she wanted to. The momentum was too strong; she was an object in motion, spinning and dodging and striking, and she would stay in motion until her prey was dead.

It was different now, though. She was still weak, and even with Lana’s help, the thing didn’t go down easily. Alekte poured all of her frustration and rage out on the rancor, but her timing was off and it landed more hits on her than it should have been able to do.

Just for a moment, as the exhilaration of the fight was fading, Alekte imagined herself in a different time and place. She put out her sabers and walked over to her companion, limping slightly, passion burning in her eyes. She took Malavai’s hand and –

– Lana smiled back at her. “That seemed to sort you out.”

“For now,” Alekte said. Neither of them moved their hands, but Alekte was the first to look away. “I, ah. You didn’t happen to bring a medkit, did you?”

“No need,” said Lana, looking her over and taking her other hand. “It doesn’t look so bad.” A deep blue glow rose up around both of them, and Alekte felt something surge up through her chest as her wounds closed and her physical pain eased.

“I didn’t know you did that,” Alekte said, finally separating her hands from Lana’s.

“I’ve been doing _that_ since the Academy,” Lana said, leading the way up a rocky path. “You’ve just never seen it.”

Alekte followed and tried to sort out the tangle of thoughts and feelings in her head. Before now, she’d never thought of Lana as anything other than a very dear friend. That was beginning to change, and she almost regretted it. If circumstances had been different, and if Malavai had been there to give his blessing, she would have been quite eager to explore the possibility of a more intimate relationship with her. She was well aware that most Sith wouldn’t have any such reservations, and would have pursued their passions wherever – and to whomever – they led, but Alekte had always been more circumspect. More than that, she knew Lana was the same way, and that neither of them would want to hurt or mislead the other just for the sake of passion.

Her thoughts were interrupted by what she saw at the top of the path. A sparkling pool took up almost the entire clearing, the water reflecting the light from the fireflies and long, luminous vines that hung down from a tree whose trunk seemed to be as wide as the bridge on the _Nemesis_ , and as tall as the ship itself. Massive branches, each of them at least as broad as the Imperial banners that hung over Kaas City, wove together in complex and fascinating patterns, arcing down from the trunk to form nearly a complete wall around the clearing.

Alekte was enthralled by the sight, and she resolved to bring Malavai there, once he was back with her and the war was won.

She walked along the edge of the pool to where Lana was standing, focused intently on her datapad. “Have we found what we need?”

“Yes, I think so,” Lana answered. “It’ll take some time to collect, so we can rest here for a while.” She handed Alekte the datapad. “Keep an eye on the numbers while I get the pump going.”

“What am I looking for?” asked Alekte, watching a thin white line snake its way along a graph.

“Just let me know if it falls below the red line.”

“Right,” Alekte said. The moving white line was nowhere near the red one, and her eyes soon wandered to more interesting things: counting the tangled branches of the tree and tracing each one back to the trunk, and watching the patterns of light on the water.

She was startled when Lana appeared next to her, taking the datapad from her with a smile. “I asked you to watch the line, not the tree,” she said.

“I was watching it,” Alekte mumbled.

Lana laughed, a sound Alekte loved more every time she heard it. “Yes, well, it’s a good job I’m here, isn’t it? I didn’t know you were so distractible.”

_I should tell her. I should tell her everything_ , Alekte thought, setting out the bedrolls they had brought with them. She knew Lana was only teasing, but there was so much more truth to that than she knew.

Instead, she gave a shy little laugh, and changed the subject. “This treaty you mentioned. What were the terms?”

“Both the Empire and Republic are forced to pay a heavy tribute to Zakuul, mainly raw materials and resources,” Lana answered, putting away the datapad. “There’s also an arms limitation statute, which both sides are breaking, of course, but they’re still incapable of challenging Zakuul directly.”

“Who rules the Empire now?” Alekte asked. It felt strange, but she found that she was almost relieved to be talking about the upheaval and near-destruction of her home and everything she’d known. Then again, there was another, more personal, subject that she knew would have to be addressed sooner rather than later.

“Darth Acina was the only Dark Council member left who hadn’t died or disappeared in the chaos,” Lana said, sounding almost as surprised as Alekte felt. “She declared herself Empress of the Sith, and has had significant support.”

“What about Vowrawn?” Alekte asked. “He isn’t dead, is he?”

“Disappeared,” Lana said. “It’s hardly the first time he’s done that; you of all people should know.”

“It’s the third time, at least,” Alekte said. “And I have to admit, I can’t see him declaring himself Emperor.”

“Neither can I,” Lana said, shaking her head.

“What about the Republic?” Alekte asked. “Is Saresh still in power?”

“Yes and no,” Lana said. “She’s no longer Chancellor, but her replacement is only a puppet. Both sides see this only as an opportunity to eliminate the other at a time of weakness, instead of combining what strength they have.”

Finally, the pieces started falling into place. “That’s why you’re here,” Alekte said. “You’re building a new alliance.”

Lana smiled. “It’s still very much a work in progress, but that is the hope, yes.”

Alekte sat down on a bedroll. “And that’s why you came to get me,” she said. Knowing Lana, and their history, she could start to see the full scope of what she had planned. She listened to the steady _whirrrr-rrr-click_ of the pump behind her, and watched the slow and steady pattern it made in her mind. She hoped it could calm her, or distract her from thinking about what Lana had planned for her.

“That’s one reason,” said Lana, sitting beside her. “You’ve done things no one else has dared to attempt. You changed the galaxy, Alekte. More than once. And if things have ever needed to change, now is the time.”

“But I didn’t do any of those things alone,” Alekte said. “I had Quinn with me. Lana, I need him.” She spoke slowly and carefully, willing her voice not to break.

“I have people looking for him, and we will find him,” Lana said. “In the meantime, you have me, and Koth.”

Alekte laughed, short and bitter. “I don’t do well with new people.”

“I was new once, wasn’t I?” Lana gave her a small, hopeful smile.

“You were different,” Alekte said, shaking her head. “You’re… _you_ , and you’re Sith. I knew what to expect, more or less. And I was home.” Alekte could feel a pressure building in her chest, and she struggled to keep her voice steady. “I need familiarity, Lana. I need –”

_TELL her, TELL her, TELL her_ , beat the drum in Alekte’s head. But she didn’t know where to begin. All of her shortcomings, all the things she needed, were tangled together like the branches above her, but there was no way she could find through them to lead her to the center. Malavai had always just known, somehow. She trusted Lana, but she had no idea how to begin to explain.

“I know,” Lana said gently, taking her hand. “I’ll help you. But please, try to give Koth a chance. He’s a good person, and he wants to help.”

“I’ll try,” Alekte said, not at all sure that it would work. But for Lana, she would try. “I’m sorry, Lana. I must not be what you expected.”

Lana didn’t hesitate at all with her reply. “Yes, you are,” she said firmly. “If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have made it this far. You have the same strength and determination you’ve always had. You are exactly what I expected you to be.”

Alekte smiled and squeezed Lana’s hand in thanks. _If you knew, you wouldn’t say that_ , she thought. She wanted to tell her, but there were too many words, all massed together, and they raced away from her.

They were silent for a while, looking out over the water, silently sharing comfort and strength. Alekte reached for words through the tangled branches in her mind but they slipped away, one after the other.

“There is something else,” Lana said finally, her voice quiet and hesitant. “I’ve felt it since the moment I found you in carbonite. There’s a power in you, something new. It’s elusive, but I know it’s there.”

Alekte felt something tug at her mind for a brief moment, retreating as quickly as it had come. She remembered. _How could I have forgotten? How could I not have known?_ She felt her throat tighten, threatening to choke out any words she could find. She kept her hand in Lana’s, drawing on her friend’s strength.

“I think the Emperor is in my mind, Lana,” she said, the words rushing out of her mouth.

“What?” Lana gasped, turning to face her but not letting go of her hand.

“He – I forgot it, somehow, until now,” Alekte said. She tried to look at Lana, but it was too much. She looked down at their hands as she continued. “When he died, there was a storm of energy. And when I was in carbonite, I dreamed about him. About everything that happened while I was gone.”

“No. That can’t be. If he were controlling you, I would know it,” Lana said. “We certainly saw enough of it on Ziost.”

Alekte shook her head. “I don’t think he’s trying to control me, exactly. Or not directly. He was trying to convince me to work with him.” She could feel every bit of hope she’d had trying to slip away. _No. I will not let him win._

“Whatever he’s doing, we can be sure that he’s always trying to deceive us somehow,” Lana said, taking both of Alekte’s hands in hers. “I believe in you, and I know you. I’ll remain watchful for any influence he might have over you.”

“What about the others?” Alekte asked. She could feel the pressure in her building, something that needed to be held back, but it was rising quickly and she knew it would have to be released.

“They wouldn’t understand,” Lana said. “And, like you said, we really don’t know anything for sure yet. We’ll keep it between us for now.”

The pressure rose up and burst inside her, releasing a flood of despair and anger that had been building for five years. “I don’t have anything anymore, Lana,” Alekte said, her voice shaking. “I don’t have a home, I don’t have Malavai, I don’t even have my own mind to myself.” She gripped Lana’s hands tightly, and held her breath, desperately trying to contain herself.

“You have me,” Lana repeated, and drew her in, holding her close and steady. “You will always have me.”

And with that, the last of Alekte’s restraint crumbled into dust, and she sobbed into Lana’s shoulder.


	8. Chapter 8

_“I’m sure I won’t be as long as you seem to think. And I’ll call you right away if I need you.”_

Alekte’s last words to him ran on a loop through Quinn’s mind as he wore down the carpet outside General Howar’s office. Over the course of the last several months, he had personally appealed to any member of Imperial High Command who would listen, and the response had always been the same. The resources couldn’t be spared; there was no point; the Wrath could be anywhere, if she was even alive at all.

_“I’m sure I won’t be as long as you seem to think.”_

Five months, one week, and two days had passed since the destruction of Darth Marr’s ship, and nothing had been right since then. The Empire needed its Wrath, now more than ever; but more than that, he needed her.

His lord. His love. His Alekte.

She was his anchor. Before he’d met her, he’d resigned himself to the idea of spending his life alone; but now, he couldn’t imagine being without her.

_“And I’ll call you right away if I need you.”_

She needed him. He knew that. And he knew that, wherever she was, no one else could help her the way he could. No one else knew her like he did, and her trust in him was the most precious gift he’d ever received.

He wondered if she knew that he needed her at least as much as she needed him. If she knew that she was his calm center to hold on to when everything else was flying apart. _Have I ever told her?_ It seemed suddenly that there were so many things he’d never said, so many things he needed to say, and what if that was keeping her away from him? What if she was alive and well somewhere, but she didn’t want to come back to him because he’d done something wrong, or had failed to do something? What if this was his fault somehow?

“Captain Quinn?” He stopped and turned toward the lieutenant at the desk, grateful to be pulled out of his spiral of anxious thoughts, if only for the moment. “General Howar will see you now.”

Quinn entered the general’s office, standing at attention and saluting as the door closed behind him.

“At ease, Captain.” She stood and returned the salute, and came around to the front of her desk. “I don’t think you need to tell me why you’re here. This is – still – about the Lord Wrath, correct?”

“Yes, sir,” he answered. “She is one of the Empire’s most valuable assets, and if she were –“

“Captain.” The general held up her hand, cutting him off. “I know what you’re going to say, and I think you knew what my answer would be before you came here.”

“May I ask, then, why you agreed to see me?” Quinn said, holding back his frustration.

“You need to call off your search, Captain Quinn. You’ve served your lord well, but the Empire needs you here.”

“Sir, the Empire needs its Wrath,” he responded without hesitation. “I am in her service until she dismisses me, or until she dies; and she is missing, not dead.”

“She has been missing for nearly six months, with no hint as to her whereabouts.” The general’s tone was firm, but almost sympathetic. “When the time comes that resources can be spared, it may be possible to begin an official search, and if the Lord Wrath is found, you will resume your service to her. Until then, however, your orders are to report to Colonel Fileni on Taungsday at 0800.”

“Sir, I –“ Quinn began, but General Howar cut him off again.

“You are dismissed, Captain.”

A cold knot settled into his chest. He only knew that he needed to leave, now, and try to sort things out. He snapped off a salute and left her office, walking through the outer office and down the hallways toward the taxi station at a brisk pace. Fragments of thoughts flew in and out of his mind. He’d expected that his request would be rejected; it had already happened so many times, and he knew exactly what to do in that case. But he had not planned for the possibility of being ordered to stop his search. He served the most powerful Sith left in the Empire, and his duty to her superseded regular military orders. But what could happen now that she was missing, and had been missing for so long?

_I should have thought of this. I should have planned for this. What is the matter with me?_

Quinn tried to piece together a new plan, but his mind would not focus. His heart was pounding when he got in the taxi to take him home, and he tried to breathe, to calm himself down, but his breaths were shallow and his mind refused to clear.

_Get home. One thing at a time. Pull yourself together._

He stumbled out of the taxi when it touched down and was grateful that no one was there to see him as he rode the lift up to his apartment. _Their_ apartment. His and Alekte’s.

It was so empty without her.

He collapsed onto a couch just meters inside the apartment, unable to go any farther. His feet were too heavy and he was shaking. He couldn’t move. Nothing was right. There was nothing he could do.

Everything was over. He’d exhausted every lead he had, searched everywhere, and what more did he really think he could do with the Eternal Fleet everywhere? He’d failed. She was still out there, somewhere, and she needed him, but he’d failed. Again.

He would never see her again. He couldn’t get through this without her. If she were here, he wouldn’t be falling apart, wouldn’t be consumed like this, wouldn’t be failing her.

_No. Stop this._

His head dropped into his hands, his fingertips digging into his scalp.

_You know what to do. You’ve done this before._

Had he always been this incompetent? What could she ever have seen in him? He was useless without her. Worthless.

_Find a plan. The first step. One at a time._

The search needed to continue, somehow. But there were no second steps from there, only dead ends. If he defied his orders, he’d have the Imperial military hounding him as well as the Eternal Fleet. He had only a handful of contacts off planet, and contacting them via holo was unreliable. He could send the _Nemesis_ out with another pilot, but there was only one other person he trusted to fly the ship and not just run away with it, and Vette was –

Vette. Quinn stood and went to the holoterminal in the next room. He knew Vette intended to leave Dromund Kaas as soon as she could, but there was a very good chance she hadn’t been successful yet. He scrubbed a hand over his face, straightened his jacket, and called up Vette’s frequency. He held his breath as he listened to the tone, steady but trembling.

Finally, the image of the young Twi’lek jumped into view, and Quinn did his best to hide his relief.

“Hey,” she said, glancing around at something behind her. “Sorry, I had to – doesn’t matter. What’s up?”

“Vette. Are you still on Dromund Kaas?”

“Yeah. You know, you’d think everybody around here would be happy to get me off the planet, but it turns out nobody wants to actually give me a ride, so...”

“Meet me at the _Nemesis_. Docking bay besh-thirty three.”

“Hey, I don’t take orders from you anymore. You gotta ask nicely if you want something.”

Quinn closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose. “ _Please_ , Vette. I’ll explain when we’re there. And if you know where to find Broonmark, bring him with you.”

“What makes you think I know where he is?”

“Then don’t bring him,” he said, struggling to keep his patience.

Vette grinned. “No, I saw him a bit ago. He’s hard to miss, you know? I’ll get him and I’ll see you at the ship.”

“Thank you.”

“Yup,” Vette said, and cut the call.

Quinn sighed as her image disappeared, and went upstairs. Vette tried his patience at the best of times, but he knew she cared about Alekte almost as much as he did, and he was sure he could convince her to continue the search. In fact, he didn’t think it would take much persuasion at all, especially since he would also be giving her a way off of the planet. As for Broonmark, Quinn couldn’t claim to understand him, but he was absolutely loyal to Alekte, and Vette could use the backup.

Quinn entered their bedroom and sat down on the bed. The bed they’d shared; the bed he hated to sleep in alone. He had a plan now. He hated that so much of it was out of his hands, but it was all he had. He didn’t know what would happen to him, what would happen to the ship, or when Alekte might be found, but he knew it was more likely than not that he would not be there when she was found.

A sudden swell of pain and grief surged up through him, and he hunched over, heaving with sobs. He thought of Alekte, of Vette finding her somewhere. Would she wonder why he wasn’t there? What if he were stationed on some backwater planet again? Or seconded to the navy and on some ship drifting somewhere in the galaxy, unable to see her or even contact her?

He didn’t want to think of the other, more dire possibilities. But after today, he knew he needed to. If he were imprisoned, or killed, what then? He would need to make sure the ship was secure for her. He needed to make sure she knew that he had done everything he could for her. She would need to know he was with her, in whatever way he could be, even if he was still very far away.

He forced himself to take several deep breaths, pushing his grief back for the moment. If he couldn’t be there when she was found, he could at least leave something for her on the _Nemesis_. He went to the wardrobe and took out a small padded case, and one of his shirts. Alekte was quite fond of borrowing his clothes, or appropriating them outright, which he never minded. There was something very appealing in the way she looked when she was wearing his things.

_Especially when a shirt like this is the only thing she’s wearing_ , he thought as a pang of desire momentarily overshadowed his sadness.

He laid the case open on the bed and put the folded shirt inside, then walked through the apartment, collecting the rest of the items. First came the obvious things – a small vial of his cologne, and a still holo of them, taken on their wedding day. As with most of the holos from that day, this one had been taken when neither of them was expecting it. When Alekte was asked to smile, it never looked quite right, but a genuine, spontaneous smile from her was one of the loveliest things Quinn had ever seen. It was small and easy to miss for anyone who didn’t know what to look for, but he knew it well, and missed it every day.

There was also a short string of polished red agates, and an oddly-shaped crystal formation, both from her large and varied collection. She had only a minor interest in geology, but she had picked up a variety of stones and crystals from every planet they’d been to. They ranged from common rocks to polished gems; it wasn’t the value or rarity that interested her, but the colors and patterns she saw in them. The string of agates was something she frequently carried with her, idly rubbing her fingers along their smooth surfaces when she was concentrating on something. The crystal, an iridescent series of angular spirals, was one of her favorites. Specifically, it was the pattern in the spirals that she loved. She’d told him how the same basic pattern could be found everywhere, and she loved to find particularly interesting examples of it.

Quinn looked down at the items arranged in the case. They all held meaning for her, for both of them, but it still seemed so impersonal, somehow. He held the last item, a holorecorder, in his hand, trying to arrange the words in his mind to express his love and his dedication, and to tell her that he would be with her as soon as he could.  

He started the recording, and steadied his voice as much as he could.

“My love…”

*********

Quinn walked through the spaceport with the case tucked under his arm, wondering how long he would have to wait for Vette. He wanted her to get underway as soon as possible; General Howar hadn’t mentioned the _Nemesis_ in her orders, but the longer they waited, the greater the chance was that someone would try to ground the ship in order to enforce her orders.

As it happened, Vette had arrived at the spaceport ahead of him, and was arguing with the soldier who was denying her and Broonmark entry to the ship’s docking bay.

“Listen, I’m on her crew! I’ve flown this ship! Just – hey!” Vette said, pointing at Quinn as he approached. “Here, ask him!”

“Sir!” said the soldier, hastily saluting Quinn, who acknowledged the salute with a brief one of his own. “These – they’re with you?”

“Yes,” he answered simply, not slowing as he went into the docking bay with Vette and Broonmark following right behind him. He was focused, but not rushed, careful almost to the point of paranoia not to arouse any unnecessary suspicion.

As intent as he was on getting Vette and Broonmark off planet, Quinn dearly wished he had had the opportunity to spend some time alone on the ship that had been his home for so many years. Everything had started here; somehow, he’d never taken the time to appreciate it, and now he didn’t know when he would be here again.

“Okay, so…are you gonna tell us why we’re here?” Vette asked, dropping onto the couch once they were all inside.

“You know that I’ve been searching for the Lord Wrath since –“ he started.

“The Lord Wrath?” Vette said, cutting him off, her tone much less sarcastic than usual, even bordering on kind. “Come on, Quinn. It’s just us. She’s your _wife_. You can say her name.”  

He could only think of a scant handful of times when he had used her name, rather than her title, when talking about her. But Vette was right; if he wanted to appeal to her friendship with Alekte, using her name was appropriate. This time.

“Yes. Alekte,” he said, feeling his chest tighten as he sat on the opposite side of the couch. Something about this seemed so very final. “However, I have been ordered to stay on Dromund Kaas. I can’t leave, but the _Nemesis_ can. And you can.”

“You want me to keep looking for her?”

“Yes. You’ll have all the information I’ve gathered so far, and I expect you have contacts of your own who will be able to add to it.”

Vette gave him a long, considering look. “Let’s say I do this. How many Imps am I gonna have chasing me down, thinking I stole the ship?”

“Stay clear of Imperial ports, and you should have no trouble,” he said, mostly sure that it was true. The military wasn’t going to spare the resources to track down one ship, not at a time like this. “I can give you credits for supplies and whatever else you might need, but you’ll have to get them elsewhere. You should leave Dromund Kaas as soon as possible.”

Vette snorted. “Well, I wouldn’t argue with that.” She looked up at Broonmark, who had been standing by silently. “What do you think, Broonie? This sound good to you?”

Broonmark gave his assent in his strange, buzzing tones. “We are loyal to Sith Clan.”

“You said it, Broonie,” Vette said, turning back to Quinn. “All right. We’re in.”

Quinn nodded, his words unexpectedly catching in his throat. His plan was coming to fruition, but he dearly wished it didn’t have to be this way. He hated to send someone else to do something that he should be doing himself, but what other choice did he have? Vette could be unpredictable and a bit reckless, but he had to admit she was trustworthy.

“Thank you,” he finally managed to say. He handed Vette a datapad and a credit stick. “These funds should last a few months at the least, and if you run low, I should be able to add to the account. All the information I’ve gathered is here, including my contacts. Many of them were on Imperial worlds, the last I knew, but if they’ve relocated you may be able to get in touch with them.”

“And I’ve got a few people I can look up, too. Anything else?”

“Yes. I would like you to contact me every ten standard days with an update, or sooner if you find something significant. Immediately, if you find _her_.” Quinn paused to steady himself before he continued. He didn’t want to consider the circumstances that would lead to the last part of his plan, but everything needed to be accounted for. “If I do not respond within two standard days, or if you find yourself unable to continue the search, then there are coordinates on that datapad for her holdings on the Yavin moon, and you will leave the ship there.”

“ _That_ place? Really? Who would want to – OH.” Vette’s eyes widened, and she laughed. “Smart. I like it.”

“Yes, well. You should start your pre-flight checks now. I’ll be a moment.” Quinn came to his feet and went into their quarters, taking the case with him.

The memories flooded in as soon as he closed the door behind him. Their first time together, after Taris, when he’d worried – quite irrationally, he knew – about her head being turned by Lieutenant Pierce. All the times he’d come to coax her out of bed in the morning, and the times she’d coaxed him back in. How his heart was torn apart when she shut him out after his betrayal, and his surprise and gratitude when she allowed him to come back. Helping her remove her armor, helping her put it on, and the last time he’d seen her. All of it was here.

He laid the case on the desk and stepped toward the door, pausing before he palmed it open. _Can I really do this? Stay behind and abandon my search? My first duty is to her, isn’t it?_

_Alekte, my lord, my love, what would you have me do?_

Quinn stepped out of the room, securing the lock behind him so only he or Alekte could enter, and no other curious crew members. He walked slowly to the bridge, dreading the thought of seeing the ship take off, leaving him behind.

He found Vette in the pilot’s chair, going over the checklist. “I’ll close up the ship once I’m outside. You can leave as soon as you’re ready,” he said, his voice quiet and hoarse as he took in the room, filled with almost as many memories as their quarters were.

Vette stopped him before he could leave. “Hey. Quinn.” She put a hand on his shoulder, briefly, and he turned to face her. “Look, I – I mean – ah, kriff, I don’t know,” she stammered. “I know you – look, I know it’s shit right now, but we’re gonna find her for you, okay? We’ll bring her back.”

The way Vette looked up at him, hopeful and sad and _caring_ , of all things, demanded a response. He was grateful, more than she knew and more than he ever expected to be to her, but his chest was tight and his throat was closed and no words would come. He nodded, with the tiniest twitch of a smile, and started to make his way out of the ship.

_I can still go with them._

He stopped at the top of the ramp, trembling.

_It’s not too late. I don’t have to stay here._

He stood still, playing out the scenarios and consequences and solutions.

_The Empire needs its Wrath._

A new plan started to come together. He had people to contact, orders to transmit, as quickly as possible.

_She is Sith; there is no one left with the authority to override her orders._

Quinn turned around and went back into the _Nemesis_ , bringing up the ramp and closing the port behind him. He heard the whine of the engines as the ship readied for departure. He strode back to the bridge, where Vette greeted him with a look of surprise that brightened into a grin as she stood and offered him his seat. Determined and focused, and with his heart pounding, he took the ship into the sky.

_I am in her service until she dismisses me, or until she dies._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alekte's "oddly shaped crystal formation" is a bismuth crystal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bismuth#Characteristics


	9. Chapter 9

_She just needs some rest. It’s been an eventful day. She’ll be fine in a few hours._

Lana knew she should get some rest, too; she’d had the same eventful day, but she couldn’t make her mind slow down. She hadn’t planned to stay out in the swamp this long, let alone be on this planet for longer than it took to get Alekte out of the Spire, but here they were anyway. She’d planned as carefully and as thoroughly as she knew how, but every time she adjusted the plan, a new set of obstacles came in that forced her back to the drawing board.

She paced around the clearing, stopping to check the pump occasionally. She hoped they wouldn’t be in this place long enough to use all the water they were collecting, but she preferred over-preparation to the alternative. If Koth really could make that ship fly, that would solve several problems and set them back on the original course, but for all his confidence, she had her doubts. She always had her doubts. She was Sith; it wasn’t in her nature to rely on anyone or anything but herself. Not without substantial evidence. Keeping herself in a realm of “if” and “should” allowed her to be prepared for variables and to adapt to changing conditions.

She looked down at Alekte as she passed her, pleased and relieved to see that she was sleeping soundly. Lana hated to think of her friend’s reaction to the impossible situation she’d been put in as one of those obstacles that had come up, but there it was. Alekte was hardly to be blamed, but she was the Wrath. Despite the years she’d known her, even Lana had bought into the myth that came with the position. The vulnerability she’d seen last night had caught her off guard, and if Lana was truly being honest, worried her. But it was a remarkable demonstration of trust that Alekte had allowed her defenses to drop at all. Whatever else might lay in store for them, Lana was happy to have a true friend with her.

Alekte was one one of the only people that Lana knew she could count on, but it wasn’t just the unexpected vulnerability that had her worried. The sense of something different in her friend was unmistakable, but could it really be the Emperor? And if it was, what did he want? How long would it be before he tried to control her? What would he try to do to her?

_And where is that husband of hers?_ Lana felt confident that she knew Alekte well, and would be able to tell if she began to act out of character. But there was one person who knew her better than she did, and she hadn’t been able to find him anywhere in five years. The last verifiable information she’d found had Quinn leaving Dromund Kaas on the _Nemesis_ , two days before he was supposed to report for duty to the regular Imperial Army. He’d sent a few shipments to Alekte’s mother, but apart from that, hadn’t been in touch with her or anyone else as far as Lana could tell. She knew Quinn was a dedicated Imperial officer, but was even more dedicated to his wife, and would have seen it as his duty to find her.

But Alekte was here now, and he was not. Lana hoped, for her friend’s sake, that he was lying low somewhere, avoiding the Imperial military who would no doubt be only too happy to arrest him. She hoped that he would resurface once Alekte started making her presence known; assuming, of course, that they managed to get off this planet and were able to continue with the rest of her plan. She knew how devoted they were to each other, and was starting to get an idea of just how much Alekte relied on Quinn. She wanted them to be reunited.

Still, Lana had to admit, at least to herself, that she had feelings for Alekte that she wouldn’t mind exploring, given the right circumstances. But these were not the right circumstances. For now, she would do whatever she could to help Alekte, and guide her through this mad galaxy she’d woken up in.

Lana was about to settle in next to Alekte and get a bit of rest herself, when her comm chimed. She walked a few steps away to answer it, speaking quietly.

“What is it, Koth?”

“Find anything yet?”

“Yes, but we’re going to wait for the light before we start back,” Lana answered. “It should only be a few more hours.”

“Gotcha,” Koth said. “Everything okay out there?”

“Yes, everything’s fine,” Lana said, glancing over at Alekte. _No need to tell him about this_. “What about you?”

“Ship’s in better shape than I thought,” Koth said. “Still needs a lot of parts, but it shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Good. We’ll see you in a few hours, then.”

“Stay safe out there.”

“You too,” Lana said, and switched off her comm. She returned to her bedroll, stretched out on it, and stared at the canopy of branches over their heads.

*********

Alekte was awake before she opened her eyes. She stayed still and quiet, listening to the sounds around her and remembering where she was. The steady rhythm of the pump had gone quiet, but she could hear Lana moving around, packing up their little camp.

She was sure Lana knew she was awake, and was grateful that her friend was giving her the space to collect herself in her own time. A rest had helped – more than she’d thought it would, as usual – and the noise and tempest of the night before had calmed somewhat, but she was still far from her normal self.

_Maybe if I refused to move until Malavai is here, that would give them proper motivation to find him._

It was a nice thought, but not a practical one by any stretch. But she needed him, in a way she hadn’t been able to explain. In a way she wasn’t sure she wanted to explain if someone – some _thing_ – was listening who might use it against her somehow. A feeling of being trapped and silenced crept in around her, threatening to drag her down into hopelessness and despair, but Alekte fought it. She didn’t have Malavai, who was a source of strength and passion for her, far more than he realized, but she did have her anger. Anger for the man who’d stolen her life from her, stolen everything from her, and kept her as a trophy for five years. She drew it in, letting it fill her, and the fire inside her that had been little more than ash since the night before sparked to life.

Alekte took a few deep breaths, centering herself as best she could before opening her eyes and coming to her feet. Her situation was very far from ideal, but she was resolved not to let it undo her again the way it had the night before. She packed up her bedroll – Lana had already seen to the rest of the camp – and joined Lana where she sat at the edge of the pond.

“Did you sleep at all?” Alekte asked, settling in beside her friend.

“A little, eventually,” Lana replied. “There’ll be time for that later, once we’re off this planet.”

Alekte looked out across the pond. In the daylight, it had lost its glow and wasn’t nearly as impressive as it had been, but it was still better than anything else she’d seen in that swamp. “I hope this hasn’t slowed us down too much,” she said.

“Not at all. Koth has been making a thorough inspection of the ship, and when we get back, you can help him find what he needs,” Lana said. “I’d say we’ve used our time well. The rest has done you good.”

“More than I expected,” Alekte said. She paused a moment, considering whether to address what had happened, but thought it best to move past it. “Did we have any ration bars with us, or…?” She trailed off, glancing back toward their supplies.

“Yes, but you should take it more slowly.” Lana stood and went to the packed-up camp, with Alekte right behind, and dug into a bag. She handed her a small pouch with a spout at one end. “Just a few sips at a time for now; your body hasn’t had food in five years.”

At any other time, Alekte might have laughed at how much Lana reminded her of Malavai in that moment. But she managed a weak smile, and did as she was told.

“Are we ready to head back?” Alekte asked, capping the spout and tucking the pouch away in a pocket.

“I think so,” Lana said, looking over their cargo. Four barrels were arranged on a small pallet, with their supplies neatly stacked on top. “If you’ll keep the way clear, I’ll do the carrying.”

Alekte collected her lightsaber hilts from the stack and clipped them to her belt, eager to put them to use as soon as possible. Lana lifted her hand and the pallet went with it, and they set off toward the _Gravestone_.

In the back of her mind, Alekte could feel someone watching her.


	10. Chapter 10

Koth was waiting by the entrance to the _Gravestone_ when they arrived, water and supplies in tow.

“Hey,” he greeted them. “Ready to go, or do you need a minute?”

Alekte barely spared a glance for Koth before she turned to Lana. _Do I really have to do this?_ The plea and the question were written quite clearly on her face.

“I can get all of this sorted,” Lana said as Koth moved aside to let her into the ship. “There’s no reason not to get started right away.” She gave Alekte a smile that was meant to be encouraging as she turned a corner and disappeared inside.

Alekte looked after her friend, tempted to follow her and let Koth hunt for whatever it was he wanted on his own. _She remembers that I outrank her, right? Or does that not matter now?_ But Koth was already on his way out, and she was not going to start this off by following along behind him.

“There’s all kinds of stuff out here,” Koth said as they left the _Gravestone_. “Maybe skytrooper patrols by now, too. Hope you’re ready for a fight.”

Alekte didn’t answer, but gave him a look that was dripping with contempt. _Who, exactly, does he think he is, to say that to_ me _?_ She looked around, scanning the area, and found a pack of swamp lurkers. They were out of their way and no threat, but that didn’t matter.

In one fluid motion, Alekte ignited her sabers and threw them at the creatures. A split second later she leapt after them, catching her weapons as they returned to her before landing with a shout and a wave of force that killed them before they knew what hit them.

She turned back to Koth, her sabers still live in her hands, and walked toward him with a slow and deliberate pace. _I am the Wrath of the Empire_ , she thought, _and if he does not know what that means, he will learn_.

Koth stared at her as she approached, uneasily shifting his rifle in his hands. “So. That’s a ‘yes’.”

“Let’s keep moving,” she said through gritted teeth, not waiting for his answer as she set off deeper into the swamp.

Alekte heard a few quick steps behind her as Koth caught up. “So that – what you did back there – that a Sith thing?” She gave him a questioning look, and he continued. “Just never seen Lana, or anybody, do anything like that. Pretty impressive.”

Alekte tried to work out what Koth was getting at. In her experience, flattery had only two underlying motives: fear or love. And she was as certain that Koth did not love her as she was that he did not fear her in the way she was used to.

_You did promise Lana you’d try_ , she reminded herself as she shut off her lightsabers, keeping the hilts in her hands. “The power behind it is Sith,” she said, still uncertain of the intent behind Koth’s question, “but it’s only a lightsaber technique. Anyone who uses the Force, and is sufficiently trained, could do it.”

“Lana’s never told me much about the Sith,” Koth said after a pause. “I mean, I know she’s Sith, and you are, but you’re so different from each other. I was kinda surprised.”

“Why?” Alekte asked. “Surely your Knights aren’t all the same kind of person.”

“They kind of are. At least to anyone who isn’t a Knight. They’ve all got that whole ‘dedication to Zakuul’ thing going. They say it’s how they get to be Knights in the first place.”

Alekte laughed, short and sharp. “That’s not how the Force works,” she said. “You can either wield it, or you can’t. There’s no test of dedication involved.” _Not that it would save us any idiot Sith or sanctimonious Jedi if there were_ , she thought.

“Yeah, I know that, _now_ ,” Koth said. “But how does it work for you?”

Alekte was no closer to knowing why Koth was asking all of these questions, and was beginning to get irritated with them. She looked around, hoping to see a rancor or a battalion of skytroopers to interrupt Koth’s barrage, but the swamp seemed to be empty of distractions for the moment.

“Being Sith is about strength and power, and service to the Empire,” she answered. She had no idea what kind of answer he was fishing for.

“That’s pretty much what Lana told me,” Koth said.

“It’s difficult to explain something you’ve always known,” Alekte said. “Some questions are better answered through experience.”

“Yeah, that sounds like Lana, too,” he said.

Before he could launch another line of questioning, Koth darted ahead of Alekte without warning. Alekte quickly ignited her sabers and followed, looking around for the threat, but it appeared that Koth’s attention had been drawn by a large object that was slowly sinking into the mud, and not by any immediate danger.

Alekte switched off her sabers and jammed the hilts back onto her belt, indignation rising up inside her. “Don’t do that again,” she said through gritted teeth.

“Do…what?” Koth asked, infuriatingly oblivious.

“Run off ahead like that, without a word. I’m not here to…follow you.” The last words came in a frustrated burst. In her entire life, she had never had to explain or justify her place in this way. That she was forced to now was galling, and she resolved to address it with Lana when they returned to the _Gravestone_.

The look Koth gave her was quizzical, but it had another element to it that Alekte couldn’t identify, and knew she didn’t like. “Okay,” he said slowly. “Next time I’ll tell you what I’m doing. This is one of the things I was looking for.” He lifted the object, a squat metal cylinder, out of the muck.

“What is it?” she asked, taking a small step back and crossing her arms, in case Koth had any ideas about her being a hauling droid or a pack animal.

“You know much about ship engines?” Koth asked with a skeptical tone.

“Only on my own ship,” she said, her throat tightening unexpectedly. She pressed her lips together and looked away. “I doubt it’s similar to what you’re looking for.”

“Maybe not,” he said, with something that almost sounded like a laugh. “We’re looking for two, three more pieces. Should all be in this general area, unless something ran off with them.”

“What about that?” Alekte asked, pointing to another small cylinder that was precariously situated in the branches of a tree a few meters away.

Koth took a few steps forward to get a better look. “Yeah, looks like it,” he said. “Not sure we can get to it without –“

Alekte stretched out her hand and carefully brought the cylinder out of the branches, almost laughing when Koth cut off and looked back at her with a startled expression. “Don’t tell me you’ve never seen Lana do this,” she said.

“No, I have, I just…I guess I forgot that was a thing.” He moved ahead to catch the cylinder as it moved toward the ground.

“One of the easiest things, really,” Alekte said, resisting the temptation to drop the object directly from the tree and instead settling it into Koth’s waiting arms.

“After all the stories Lana’s told me, I believe it.”

“Exactly what has she told you about me?” Alekte asked. She trusted Lana’s discretion, but she was still very curious what this man – about whom she knew next to nothing – knew about her.

“Mostly just stories about the things you’ve done,” he said, carrying the cylinders under his arms as they continued their search. “Rishi, Yavin, Ziost, all that stuff. Honestly, it was all kind of hard to believe. Half the reason I agreed to help with this rescue was to see if you were actually real.”

Alekte felt a faint whisper of something – was it amusement? – in the back of her mind, but it was gone again before she could pinpoint it. She wanted to shake it off, to ignore it, but it felt too dangerous. A predator lurking in the shadows.

“Did you think Lana was lying to you?” Alekte asked as Koth inspected what looked like a small crate he had pulled from the water. She was sure she’d seen something like that as part of the engine on the _Nemesis_ , but without the proper context, she couldn’t be sure what it was.

“Not lying. Just exaggerating,” he said, opening up a collapsible crate he’d been carrying with him and setting the parts they’d collected inside. “Gotta admit, I’m looking forward to seeing you in action.”

_I’m not here to perform for you._ “You think I won’t live up to Lana’s stories?” Alekte asked.

“Didn’t say that,” Koth answered, lifting the nearly-full crate with a grin. “Got one more thing to find, then we head back. We’re looking for a fuel cell.”

Alekte knew well enough what a fuel cell looked like, unless the Zakuulan design was drastically different. They set out, scanning the area for the last piece they needed. Alekte very much wanted to be back with Lana, with someone she knew, and not out in a strange place with someone she didn’t know at all. She had promised Lana that she’d try to get on with the man, but some kind of familiarity, even familiarity by proxy through Lana, would make it a great deal easier to keep that promise.

“So anyway,” Koth said, breaking the silence that Alekte had been appreciating, “I figure, I know all this stuff about you and what you’ve done, you probably deserve to know something about me. Fair’s fair, right?”

_Lana, I hope you appreciate what I’m doing for you_ , Alekte thought, preparing herself for a new battery of mostly one-sided conversation. “All right,” she said, trusting that Koth would pick up what she was willing to lay down and run with it.

And run he did. “I don’t know if Lana’s already told you, but I was the captain of a warship during Arcann’s campaign against the Core Worlds.”

“She mentioned that you deserted,” said Alekte, continuing to search for the fuel cell.

“Yeah, me and my whole crew. Well, most of them. I’m not going to pretend we didn’t do our share of damage, but…I dunno, I guess I wanted to make sure I was up front about that.”

“What made you decide to do that?” Alekte would have preferred not to continue the conversation, but Koth had presented an exception. If there was any sort of potential for disloyalty lurking in her new crew, she wanted to be prepared for it this time. But even as she thought of that, she felt a pang of regret. _It’s not as if it was true disloyalty, before. He was caught between two Sith, what options did he really have?_

Koth interrupted her thoughts, and for once, she was grateful for it. “We were holding territory on Denon. The locals rioted, and the orders were to open fire until they stopped.”

Alekte heard his footsteps stop, and turned toward Koth as he continued. “We didn’t want to be there in the first place, and massacring civilians? That’s not what Zakuul is supposed to be about.”

As the Wrath, Alekte had been an executioner for the Empire, and had never regretted it. But both of her parents – her Force-blind mother perhaps more so than her father – had instilled her with a strong sense of duty to the Empire and all of its people. And that never included killing civilians, when it could be at all avoided.

“That was the right thing to do,” she said, and Koth nodded his thanks, almost reminding her of Malavai for a moment with the way the slight look of uncertainty slowly left his face with her words.

“And speaking of civilians,” he continued, to Alekte’s growing wariness, “I wanted to ask you about what happened back at the reactor.”

“I stopped the explosion,” Alekte said, seeing the question that was coming and suspecting that Koth was not going to get an answer he liked.

“Yeah. Yeah, you did, and I’m grateful for that.”

“Then there’s no more to be said.” Alekte turned away from him to keep searching for that damn fuel cell, that thing that was keeping her out here with him, but Koth kept going.

“Well, it’s just that it seemed like you had your own reasons for doing it. And I just want to know what they were.”

Alekte turned to face him again, fixing him with a stare that had made generals, moffs, and even lesser Sith cower. But it seemed to have nearly no effect on this man in front of her.

“I want to know what kind of person we rescued back there. That’s all.”

“You rescued a person who had just come out of five years in carbonite, Koth.” Using his given name felt unnatural to her, but she continued. “You rescued a person whose sensitivity to noise and other sensory input was dramatically heightened because of the carbonite. You rescued one of the most powerful Sith in the galaxy who would have been entirely useless to you if that noise had not stopped.”

“You’re serious. The noise? That was it?”

Alekte didn’t answer. Koth had taken her dangerously close to revealing something she needed to keep hidden; not just from him, this man who barely knew her, but from any potential eavesdroppers. She turned and took a few steps away from him.

“Hey. Outlander. Come on.”

“My Lord.”

“What?”

“The proper mode of address for a Sith is ‘my lord’,” Alekte repeated.

“My – are you serious? _That’s_ what you want me to call you?” Koth said, incredulous. “Fine, if we’re gonna be like that, you can call me Captain Vortena.”

Alekte’s breath caught in her throat. _It’s only a rank_ , she thought, her hands beginning to shake. _How many other captains have I spoken to, addressed by that title?_ But now, far away from everything she knew, there was only one she cared about. Her Captain. Her Malavai. She crossed her arms, hiding her hands, but the trembling had spread through her and she couldn’t stop it.

*********

_Well, shit._

Koth knew he’d stepped in something, but he couldn’t figure out what.

He walked around the immediate area, trying to give the Outlander some space while not making her think he was running ahead without her. He felt like he’d learned a great deal in the last few hours about what this person did _not_ like, and very little about what she did like. And he was realizing now that he’d forgotten nearly everything Lana had told him about her personality, which seemed to be so much harder than Lana had described.

_‘My Lord’? Really? I mean, okay, Lana did call her that, so I guess she expects it, and it’s not like she’s just doing it to me. And this isn’t exactly an ideal situation, she’s just out of carbonite and she’s missing all of her – oh, fuck me running._

Koth tripped over the hard edge of the fuel cell he’d been looking for and nearly fell face-first into the swamp. But more importantly, he realized what he’d said.

_Alekte Havelan-Quinn. Captain Quinn. Her damn husband. Come on, Vortena, connect the dots that are right next to each other with a nice dotted line to help an idiot like you._

He set his crate down on a somewhat dry patch of land and put the fuel cell with the rest of the parts. Hefting the crate again, he took a few wary steps toward Alekte. She wasn’t shaking anymore, but there was a definite _something_ in the air, and it wasn’t good.

“Hey, uh. Found the fuel cell. And…sorry. For what I said there.”

Alekte turned around and just…looked at him. She clearly wasn’t happy, but she wasn’t glaring at him, just _looking_. The glares he could handle, he’d been on the receiving end of plenty of those, but this? He couldn’t figure out what was going on, so he just kept talking.

“I know you’re in a shit situation here. We all are. And sometimes my mouth just gets ahead of my brain and I say things I shouldn’t, but I promise, I’m on your side and I’m here to help. And I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have – you can just call me Koth.”

Alekte continued to look at him for a long moment. A really, really long moment. Koth was about to start talking again, to fill up the uncomfortable silence with anything else at all, but then she made a little blink-and-he’d-miss-it nod.

“Let’s go,” she said, and headed off back the way they’d come.

They’d barely walked a hundred meters before Koth’s comm chimed. He wondered if Lana was checking on them, but instead, HK appeared.

“Request: Please rendezvous at my current coordinates at your earliest convenience, masters. I require assistance,” the droid said, then cut the call without any elaboration.

“Blasted droid,” Koth said, checking the last call’s location on his comm unit. It was out of their way, but not by all that much, and if something was wrong, it wasn’t like they could ignore it.

_Why can’t a droid just do its job, and not bother me? Why does it have to have a personality?_ He knew some people were into that sort of thing, but he’d never really been one of them.

“It’s not far,” he said to Alekte, who just nodded again.

_And I thought Lana was scary in battle mode_ , he thought as Alekte drew her lightsabers again. _She’s got nothing on this one._

It didn’t take them long to reach the small camp where HK was staring down his blaster rifle’s sights at five ragged people who looked like they’d been out in that swamp for way too long.

“Please! Save us!” one of them called as Koth and Alekte approached.

“What the hell is going on here? What’d you do to them?” Koth yelled at HK.

“Protestation: I have done nothing to these pitiable meatbags, master!” HK responded, still not lowering his rifle. “They were merely bystanders when I destroyed a group of skytroopers. They’ve requested our help in escaping the enemy’s notice.”

_What the actual fuck, HK_. “You think this is what help looks like?” Koth knew that HK’s version of ‘help’ did often involve violence, but this was completely ridiculous. “Put that blaster down.”

“Please,” said the man who’d spoken before. “We’re no danger to you. We were exiled for protesting Emperor Arcann’s war.”

“How long have you been here?” Alekte stepped forward to stand next to Koth, fixing that stare of hers on the cowering exiles.

“Months,” the man replied. “We’ve already lost two of our friends. Can you help us?”

Koth looked at Alekte, who didn’t seem to notice him as she looked over the people in front of her. He had absolutely no idea what she might do.

“Get up,” she said, without a hint of sympathy in her voice. HK’s hand twitched, still holding his rifle, but he stowed it with a gesture from Alekte.

The exiles came to their feet, still scared and uncertain, a feeling which Koth shared, at least in part. He remembered that Lana had said that Alekte could be merciful and understanding toward civilians, but he didn’t know if that extended to Zakuulans. _She knows her husband’s missing, maybe even dead. Shit, maybe even killed by Zakuulans. But her lightsabers are back on her belt, so that’s something, right?_

“Do any of you know anything about engines, mechanics, any of that?” she asked, her tone just as cold as before.

“I know engines,” a woman in the back spoke up in a rush. “Just…small ones, nothing bigger than a shuttle, and only as a hobby. But I have the basic principles.”

“Excellent,” said Alekte. “The rest of you. Can you work? Lift, carry, perform simple tasks?”

The first man looked back at the others, who all nodded at him, desperate for anything that would get them out of their current situation. “Yes,” the man said, “just, please, help us.”

“Right. We’re repairing a ship. We can take you with us, but in exchange you will help us with our work.”

The exiles nearly rushed Alekte and Koth, babbling their thanks, and only backing off when Alekte took a step back and held up a hand.

“Koth, you and I will take point,” Alekte said, taking up her lightsabers again. “These people can carry the parts you’ve collected. HK, bring up the rear…and do not shoot any of them.”

“Protestation: I was never going to shoot these meatbags, master,” HK said with a slightly injured tone as he drew his rifle again. “I was merely ensuring that they did not flee.”

Alekte waited as Koth distributed the parts in his crate among the exiles, since none of them looked strong enough to carry everything. He broke down the crate again and took up his own rifle as they headed back to the _Gravestone_.

“Thank you,” Koth said quietly to Alekte as they walked. “I’m glad to know you don’t want to take out everyone in Zakuul.”

“They’ll be useful,” she said, just as quietly. “We’ll be out of here much sooner with their help.”

Koth thought about that. He was glad she was doing the right thing, but he wanted some reassurance that it was happening for the right reasons. “Would you have let them come with us if they couldn’t work?”

“That hardly matters now, does it?”

Koth swallowed his reply. He had no idea how to respond in a way that wouldn’t cause either or both of their tempers to rise, and he was no closer to knowing what kind of person he’d rescued.

_What the hell have I gotten myself into?_


End file.
